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[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I tried that one and died on the first level D:

[Xion]

Well, I've never finished a game, but I've started dozens. One of the first, and the farthest I've ever gotten was an RPG maker game (I forgot its name) where you were a kid whose father was killed and so you went on a quest for revenge (How original!). I stopped working on it, though, 'cause RPG maker was too limiting.
The first game I ever did the graphics on was a platformer called Redd's Adventure (or something generic like that) that I started in Game Maker, where you played as a red dude name Redd. He was created using only MSPaint's circle tool.
Needless to say, it sucked. And I stopped working on it 'cause GM was too limiting.

[dbest]

The first game I made is called Dark Star Calling. Started it on June 07.
Its a space shooter game made as part of the Game in a Day comp...

[Kon-Tiki]

Mine would be a crappy QBasic question-and-answer game I made when I was 10. I don't concider it as an actual game, but still... I suppose it would be the first one I made. The story went as follows: You were in a city, which was going to blow up if you answered the questions wrong. Those questions involved such things as: "What is my favourite food?" "What weather is it outside?" etc. One of the answers (probably to the weather question) involved glitter jackets :D Yeah, crap, I know. My friends never liked it, as they kept dying in it :D

[Keops]

My first "game" (that's not a game, it's crap) was Nova Wings made for the 72HGDC, you can find it here ->

http://www.llama-land.net/keops/online/games.html

the first one. The others are my 2nd and 3rd games respectively.

I'm currently working on my first serious, non-compo game project at the moment

[Slash - Santiago Zapata]

I tried that one and died on the first level D:

Hope you liked it... it's a bit easier once you get the hang out of it... did you get to the point where the entire army backs you up?? I remember I was so proud of having done that :D

Also, it has a gauntlet mode for the hardcore types

[Pigbuster]

WARNING: WAY, WAY, WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION BECAUSE I AM OVERLOADING ON NOSTALGIA.

The first game I ever made was with something called Cocoa (I don't think it's related to the modern "Cocoa". It isn't an actual code, but a game-making program. It WAS created by Apple, though, so who knows. Maybe I have an ancestor of the modern system.)

It was a very simple program, but god did I have fun with it.
Most of the games I made didn't last very long, but when I started on one with my best friend doing the art and sound, well...
(Note that this game is 10 times better with the sound. It was all ridiculous and AMAZING, and like the rest of the game, rarely made any sense).

It was called "FRUMPY'S ADVENTURES".

You play as Frumpy, a strange man with a radioactive aura, blue skin, and a dapper 'stache. His limbs are floating because he is Rayman's uncle, apparently (Just an excuse to not draw any limbs  ).

The first level, Mime Menace.
Mimes will push Frumpy back a space, so he has to pick up the ninja stars and attack. This turns the Mime into a smiley face (try it yourself sometime!), which is harmless.
He can only get past the hotdogs by picking up the dentures. The dentures, of course, turn Frumpy purple. And he doesn't really eat the hotdogs, but swaps places with them (My friend had an explanation for this, but I have forgotten it. He actually made a perfectly reasonable explanation for every aspect of the game).

Frumpy can only jump 2 spaces in the air (He can jump even when he isn't on the ground, seeing as I didn't understand how to do that when I made this). He cannot jump, however, if there is only one space above him. Enter the cheese. When he steps on it, he will bounce up one space. PERFECT.
The blow dryer will push Mimes away one space.
The arrows can move Frumpy... AT WILL.

After reaching the toilet, it's off to level 2: Do You Have A Cough Drop?
My friend didn't have any ideas for the level theme, so he just made a bunch of scribbles for the basic tile.

After those 2 levels it's time for the thrilling final boss: Barney.
He is holding a magic formula... which had something to do with the plot, but I forget.
He throws fireballs. Occasionally they turn into a meteor, which Frumpy can pick up to turn into SUPER FRUMPY.
A mighty throw of a comet is enough to blast Barney into his true form.

He throws ice walls at you that sometimes rocket into the ceiling, impaling you!
And look! A MISSILE.
You need to get over to the missile and launch it into the wall, which makes a block fall on his head, which makes him throw up a battery.

The battery turns Frumpy into HYPER FRUMPY, and with one shot of laser-eyes to the chest, Barney is down for the count.
The potion turns Frumpy back into his true form and it is the end.

But that's not all! We made a sequel which is ten times better than this.
I'm afraid that will have to wait for another post, though.

[rapidwingo]

The first game I ever made began as a little joke I made for a few friends and ended up turning into a small game. As you can tell from the graphics, I had absolutely no understanding of what I was doing at the time. I personally think that the game plays  and feels pretty nice because of the boat animations, but you go ahead and decide. The game is called Virtual Rowboat (screen below) and was made in Game Maker due to my lack of ability at the time. Since, I have gained a much better idea of how to make graphics and have slowly jumped from concept to concept failing to finish any project I come up with.

Link: http://files.filefront.com/VirtualRowboatzip/;4205037;;/fileinfo.html

[wourme]

I made my first games with Gary Kitchen's GameMaker on my Commodore 64. None of them were ever really complete games, and the disks I stored them on are long since lost or corrupted. (The Commodore still works, though.) I kind of wish I could go back in time to take some screenshots.

[sega]

I made my first games with Gary Kitchen's GameMaker on my Commodore 64. None of them were ever really complete games, and the disks I stored them on are long since lost or corrupted. (The Commodore still works, though.) I kind of wish I could go back in time to take some screenshots.

Hahah me too.  I was around 7 years old, and I made "Super Luigi Brothers" in that thing.  Man I was original.  I went on to draw comics of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Vegetables" and "Darkwing Dog", years later, if I remember correctly.  I guess I was just born with this gift of creativity .

[Kon-Tiki]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Vegetables :D That actually reminds me of an episode of Shin-chan, where Action Bastard organizes a contest to find the new move for him :D

[ravuya]

WARNING: WAY, WAY, WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION BECAUSE I AM OVERLOADING ON NOSTALGIA.

The first game I ever made was with something called Cocoa (I don't think it's related to the modern "Cocoa". It isn't an actual code, but a game-making program. It WAS created by Apple, though, so who knows. Maybe I have an ancestor of the modern system.)

The new Cocoa and the old Cocoa are related in name only. I have to admit I had a double-take when I was reading the liner notes for OS X Server 1.0 and noticed that the development API was Cocoa.

Cocoa has a special place in my heart because it brought us Yogurt Commercial and A Day At Work, two of the most brilliant (and obscure) indie games ever.

[Outer God]

Well, I've never finished a game, but I've started dozens. One of the first, and the farthest I've ever gotten was an RPG maker game (I forgot its name) where you were a kid whose father was killed and so you went on a quest for revenge (How original!). I stopped working on it, though, 'cause RPG maker was too limiting.

heheh, RPG Maker 2000 was wat i used to make my first game.  a friend of mine got me into it back in highschool.  never finished it though, and i'm still kicking myself for deleting the whole thing cos it's fun playing through your old work.  it was about some sword that split in two and opened a void to another dimension.  you played as Xeno, some random that got caught up in stuff.  i split the game into 3 continents: Chronasia, Antioch and another starting with 'B', but only managed to complete 2 of them.

i too found it far too limiting.  i wasn't happy with the default battle system and made a custom zelda styled one instead.  i even included special attacks, a HUD and abilities that you could use on the field (e.g. when you attacked an opponent, a battle animation would show on them displaying their HP as a bar).  it was fun, and prolly the reason i got into programming and game development.

wish there was a way to bring it back from my old hard drive, though i dare not finish it.

[fish]

it was a myst-like point and click puzzle adventure game i made with hypercard on my sexy black and white mac classic.

it was set in gadget city and there where robots and machines of all kinds.
and you just...wandered around...activating them. and sometimes stuff would happen.

then i made a game with my dad, it was, i guess, a collection of minigames of sorts. dad would code everything, and then ask me to make some art. and id use this thing called kid pix, wich i loved. kid pix had a lot of stamps you could use, and my fav one was this little penguin that i used everywhere. the game ended up being called the penguin game for it.
it was actually a lot of fun, and was quite challenging at times. dad would add bonus levels in secret and wait for me to find them accidentaly.

then dad made a bunch of games on his own. one of them was a point and click adventure game set in a spaceship, and to get around i had to solve all these math puzzles everywhere. playing the game counted as "studying". it was great, there was a story and the spaceship was huge!

after that he made another first person myst-like, set in a mysterious mansion full of derelict robots and secret passages. it was cool because you could actually rotate your point of view to any of the 4 cardinal point in any room. which was fancy at the time.
it was hard as hell and i never finished it.

ah, mac classic.
you were good to me.

[ravuya]

Kid Pix was pretty cool. I remember using it to develop icon art.

Of course, now, my meager pixel art talents were squandered in favour of becoming a cold, calculating programming type. Maybe I should take a few months off and figure out pixel art again (Derek's tips for avoiding ugly lines is a big plus for my stuff so far).

[spellcaster]

My first "real" game was a pacman in textmode. I think I used Turbo Pascal 5 to code it. It had some "cool" features like a joke database so it would display a joke in each level. The pacman was the ascii smile, the ghosts were ascii Omegas - worked nicely

[Xander]

I wanted to join in the fun, not that I'd ever made a game before, but I like to try and involve myself as much as possible. I once made a map for Warcraft II with my brother where we invented our own game called Hero Race. Everyone had to develop as fast as they could to chop down trees, pass moats, chop more trees and blow up mountains to get to the passive heroes in the centre. The game was obviously to still kill everyone else, but the question was whether you focused your efforts on collecting the heroes, or whether you built up your own forces to rival the hero collective, or whether you tried to kill your enemies before they reached it, which maybe possible for one, but killing only one of them will just increase the others chances of getting them. I know this wasn't much, but being my first introduction into this sort of field of user created content I did learn a lot about the entire process and it was pretty damn satisfying. Enough to make me greatly appreciate everyone elses endeavours which clearly are far more advanced than mine, even if they're really about shitting all over a museum.

But hey, I was 8, so it was important to me, and like I said, I may only be able to offer you an orange when you want an apple, but dammit it's fruit alright? At least I didn't give you a vegetable. I hate lettuce. So much. So please just be glad I attempted to share, and then trounce my ideas with your following fantasticalness. Go!

[Farmergnome]

I got a bad habit of not finishing alot of anything until recently, so most of my "first" games are sitting around on a backup drive somewhere...  First unofficial game, worms inspired strategy shooter in hypercard  :D  Official would be a zombie survival shooter, always actually considered releasing it, really had a blast on the pixel art making the zombies get gibed in a variety of ways    :D

[can-o-spam]

What a great thread.

I remember being a little kid and just HOUNDING my dad and older brother to help me write games. I think the only one we finished was a very simple catch 'the falling stuff' thing in QB with ASCII graphics. Lots of other attempts though.

As a teenager I did lots of modding... Nerf Quake (for Quake 1) was an actually mostly finished one. Still sitting around on download sites across the net. http://www.fileaholic.com/idgames/total_conversions/nerfq.txt Pretty cool in my opinion. I also made the Extreme Frisbee and Themepark mods for Tribes 1. http://www.planettribes.com/frisbee/ The Themepark idea actually kind caught one and lots of other people made them too.

Jump ahead a long time again and now I've been making a few flash games. This is the 1st one: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/282254
And this the 2nd: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/309955

Now I'm making one for the B-games comp. Weeee!

[Melly]

My very first game, I think, was an unfinished RPG Maker 2K thing with almost only graphics from the built-in resources. I had a bit of fun making it, but it was a bit too grandiose for my experience level (Level 1 in an RPGish scale. I'm now at Level 2  ) but I was fairly proud of the little I managed to make.

After that I tried Game Maker, which I'm still using. The first game I almost made in it was an abstract shmup, you know, when it was fashion  .