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[saibot216]

Nothing survived my childhood "game design" years. I would draw up a lot of Onimusha and Final Fantasy sorts of games. I did develop a lot of games with RPG Maker (I assume a lot of us did), but that was pretty much it for me.

[thersus]

Ok, I made some pics, go to this link to see them if you want: https://plus.google.com/photos/108799846120899568084/albums/5851652019082668129

I used to "design" these games in a form of game mags - I usually would write down the walkthrough and add some pics on the sides. And other think I did a lot was "screenshots" of the games, and character profiles with pics and info. The last pic on the album is a card game which was sort of a mix of Pokémon and Digimon, and after a while, Yu-Gi-Oh. I don't remember how it was suposed to be played.
All this stuff was made before I was 14, which was the age I started making rpg maker thingies.

[Brother Android]

I don't know if I ever designed a whole game, per se, until I was in high school. But I know that somewhere around my parents' house there is a drawing from when I was five or so (I'll scan it if ever I get the chance) of a made-up Super Mario World level where every platform is covered in moons - 10-Up Moons, 100-up Moons, etc.

That there was nothing more tantalizing to my imagination than having a hundred extra lives in Super Mario World probably says something about my gaming skills at the time.

[Graham-]

One time I had 21 lives. I wanted to wait for my Mom to come home so I could show her.

[AdamButcher]

Ok, I made some pics, go to this link to see them if you want: https://plus.google.com/photos/108799846120899568084/albums/5851652019082668129

Thanks for sharing thersus, this is exactly what I wanted to see! Hand-drawn maps and long chunks of handwriting are so cool.

And those frames with the person in - they kinda look like it's from a point-and-click adventure. Is that what you were designing?

[mono]

I made LOTS of board games. I don't think any of it survived.

[thersus]

And those frames with the person in - they kinda look like it's from a point-and-click adventure. Is that what you were designing?

It was actually some 3rd person action game that mixed Resident Evil with Urban Chaos. You got that impression just because the interface is framed, and not over the game viewport, wasn't it? I never thought about that before, but it makes sense haha

[impulse9]

I think I was around 10 when I made these.

[Brother Android]

Man, I feel bad for the sucker who can only go 100 km/h.

Do you remember what kind of game it was supposed to be? It looks cool.

[impulse9]

Hehe, yeah I didn't really understand the dynamics of space travel at the time.

It was based on vehicle card games (I had a bunch of them at the time). Basically players take turns playing cards, first one picks a property, the card with the higher property wins and the winner starts the next turn.

I think I only played it a few times.

[tnr]

When I was a kid I got my grubby mitts on a copy of Adobe Flash, and 5 or 6 really, really bad flash games showed up hidden my schools computer network. There was one where Mario challenged Bullet Bill to flying in one direction mindlessly (a launch game) and another where you had to defeat the evil card monsters of Loki with the Hat of justice (Kinda like single screen Zelda.) As far as I know, they're still floating around inside my old school's computer network.

I also thought up (but never made) two or three very strange potential RPG's starring Squid and Cuttlefish.

[Maud'Dib Atreides]

Facade

Very simple platformer ninja game about a schizophrenic I made when I was 13.

You had to get from point A to point B in each stage, but when standing outside houses, random floating eyes would appear on the screen, everything would start to shake and fall apart, the level would lose random tiles, and drain your energy away.

I stopped working on it after I turned it in as a final project for The Tell-Tale Heart media competition my school was having. I lost to a guy who made a Tell-Tale heart live action video..


Damn it, why won't it run on Windows 8...?

[sublinimal]

Pretty impressive. That doesn't sound like the sort of idea 13-year-olds would think of, and the art was beyond your years too.

What sort of creative stuff do you do nowadays?

[Maud'Dib Atreides]

Thanks!

You sound exactly like the string of teachers who judged the project submissions

My inspiration at the time was N (It was the hottest flash game at my school, and I wanted to make it tie into schizophrenia in some way) The judges were a bit worried as to my mental state, being a 13 year old who would make such a game, and there was a scheduled parental meeting that never actually took place. :p

Trust me, the art is terrible compared to what I do now, and I'm 18 now:



That's in MSPaint. I work in MSPaint now. No matter how old I get though, I will always suck at human anatomy. You can see it in the picture.

My game right now is a bizzaro online scalable platformer about a young French Canadian boy who saves the cosmos by conquering planets, based heavily on a youtube series known as TheSpiritScience as well as other actual recorded alien consipracists.. It's being designed in the 16 bit architecture- SNES, and Genesis.

What you see above is a Pleadian soldier, one of the few characters in my game. I need to start a devlog soon, I'm building an ever growing team.

[sublinimal]

You sound exactly like the string of teachers who judged the project submissions

I know because I got those comments too. Some of the art I rediscovered from that time wasn't half bad, and there were some pretty ambitious ideas behind my creative projects. I was just too unconfident and lazy to make anything beyond "just good".

I guess I could've used some kind of an instructor, someone who'd helped me to learn some proper work routines instead of patting me on the back when I wasn't really even trying. Then again, I might've become a writer or a comic artist (like I thought then) rather than a computer scientist, and in retrospect, that wouldn't have been the right path for me. Life works out like that sometimes.

Also, N was a big inspiration to me too in junior high, still one of my favorite indie games. I loved games with level editors and a community revolving around them. It was cool how everyone had their own map making style and there were even trends in the community - it was like discovering some hidden sub-culture. Given that it was around the time we got a proper Internet connection, it seemed all the more futuristic to me.

[Sir Raptor]

Wow, lemme just get out my game sketchbook and see what doesn't suck.

- A Pac-Man RPG which ended up being a quest to save the entire video game world. Apparently, I was really good at tracing the Soul Edge back then.
- Some arcade game about a penguin who punched mutant pumpkins. Looks playable in retrospect. Got a lot of different pumpkin types made up, some power-ups, even a few bosses.
- A page fulla cartoon spheres with floating ball hands and weapons. I think I was playing a lot of Madness Interactive at the time.
- Oh god, Cow Puncher II. A beat-em-up arcade game where you punch cows until they fall over. There never was a Cow Puncher I. Or a II, for that matter, because I never learned how to code any of this.
- Some beat-em-up where you played as a zombie. Looks like you'd be able to eat brains for health.
- A game where you played as a ninja who killed zombies. The buggers died in different ways apparently, based on what the killing slash was. Then I drew the same thing again, with kittens instead of stick figures. Oh god, I even put a little © next to Ninja vs. Zombies. I was stupid back then.
- Worms clone.
- Mario Party clone.
- Alien Hominid clone.
- Some game where you kicked a chicken across a level, from the looks of it. I guess it would have played something like a combination of golf and that GBA game Go! Go! Beckham.
- An adventure game about trying to get through five haunted houses, each with its own theme. I see one of those was called the Hentai House. I'm just gonna turn the page now.
- Ooh, this one actually isn't terrible. A volleyball game with characters and mechanics straight out of the fighting game genre. I'd counter a volleyball spike with a Shoryuken any day if I could. Plus I made up this demon thing with shadowy spikes and armor with eyes all over it that looks pretty 13-year-old-edgy-cool.
- Some thing that I have no idea what it is. Were you supposed to catch enemy projectiles and throw them back? Was I playing Mischief Makers, or was I just watching someone else play Mischief Makers?
- When I was a kid, I thought it would be cool to make an MMO where people drew their own playable characters. I was gullible back then. On the plus side, I came up with a few good monsters, like some gremlin thing, a small bean with a big club called a Beaner, and oh god, is that a cyborg cheese? Game Of The Year for cyborg cheese.
- WarioWare clone.
- A game where you made your own robot gorilla out of different parts and made it fight other robot gorillas. I put in that damn © again next to Robot Gorillas. Jesus.
- Joe + Rock. Okay, this one's got some history. I came up with this entire 5-minute adventure game idea after I saw somebody with an I <3 Huckabees sprite gif as their Skype profile. I made this entire plot about a guy who fell in love with a large rock, and had to find chocolate, flowers, and a ring to woo it. If I ever make a game in Stencyl, this might have to be the first.
- Smash Bros. clone.

[AdamButcher]

Sir Raptor - I was exactly the same, always cloning the game that I was playing at the time, but not really aware that I was doing it. And then kinda making it stupider.

Could you do some scans of the sketchbook? These things are so much better to see

[Endurion]

Aww, I'd like to see more sketches

I've got most of my old papers (must be, dang, 25 years now?), a huge map put on graph paper (8x8 I think) that was planned as a Bard's Tale alike in Turbo Pascal and quite a bit more.

Also have a few newer bits of a 3d Chu Chu alike with up to four characters, boss fights and a fluffy story fleshed out. Even went to a playable state.

[Sir Raptor]

I think this is one hundred percent related.

[thersus]

I think this is one hundred percent related.

This games are simply amazing! They are kind of similar to the ones the guy who ministrated the workshop makes himself (pretty crazy, that is). I'll try to get in touch with him, apparently he studies at the same university I'm starting to take some doctorate classes (what a small world!).

Since I became an adult person, one of my dreams is to be able to teach kids to actually make the things I, when a child, only could dream of making some day. I think that's why I loved this so much :D