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[Super-Dot]

My first "game" was an experiment with sprites and animation more than anything else. You were a green dude with antennae that glowed, with little green dots rotating around the tips to show that they were glowing. You could transform into a ball (by pulling your limbs into your body), and when you moved as a ball, there were animated lines around you that made you look like a meteor. If you moved into the room to the right, you ended up floating in space, where there were a bunch of wormholes. Touching one caused a swirly-rotating animation and transported you to a random point on the screen. Two rooms to the left of that was a hockey rink, where you were the puck, except that you were the ball, and you tried to score in the top goal despite the hockey players trying to shoot you into the bottom goal. It was in this room that I learned to hate physics and AI!

Man, I need to figure out how to access the data on that old hard drive.

[Cymon]

Oh, thank you for bringing this thread back up. My first game is now available for download. I made it a Christmas gift on Cymon's Games. It's called Gravity Whip. Enjoy.

[increpare]

Oh, thank you for bringing this thread back up. My first game is now available for download. I made it a Christmas gift on Cymon's Games. It's called Gravity Whip. Enjoy.

working link

[Radiant]

Ah, that'd be a long time ago, and in GW-BASIC. I'd be hard-pressed to remember which one was actually first, because I did a lot of it about 15-20 years ago. I had a four-color screen (four shades of sepia, that is) and my friend was jealous because he had only two...

I believe the actual first was the awesome adventure of Circle, who flies around the screen and has to avoid running into Square. Ah, those where the days! 

[Twerpling]

Haha! Oh man. The first game I completed was called "Mystery House" and it was a text parsed adventure game. It consisted of first person static images and there were puzzles. It was written in QBasic when I was 9 years old. The house had something like 12 rooms and like 10 puzzles. I forget what the ending was (if there was any ending).

The best part about this game was  no one had told me how to read files, let alone parse file data, so all the graphics and sound were all procedurally generated. I actually did not know how to read files in till my freshman year. This led to the creation of a whole slew of games with procedurally generated content. When I was 11 I wrote a first person shooter (which was crappy) where all the sprites and walls and everything was procedurally generated. I showed it to my step dad who is an electrical engineer and he proceeded to flip his lid. I didn't realize why until some time later.

As for "Mystery house", or it's action packed successor "Murder Bike" they are probably sitting on a floppy somewhere in my mothers house. Man I wish I had screen shots of those things...

[Twerpling]

...QBasic 4.5...
I wish I'd kept screenshots of that game. It was called "Manoir Mystérieux"... MYSTERIOUS MANOR.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.

ARE YOU ME?

[Simon Andersson]

The first game I wrote. That's a great memory.
I was eight-ten something and had just arrived home from school one day. Dieing to play some Zelda: A Link to the Past.
I walked into the house and sees my brother.
My brother had downloaded a c64-emulator and was all over it in nostalgia. This was when the internet was still quite young. He said he had a Commendor 64 "back in the days", and I belived him.

As it happens, he mentions that he used to make short Text-games. As any sane person would have done, I hit him hard with my young but powerful fists until he finally gave up and promised to teach me the secret behind this thing he called "BASIC".

So he did and I loved it! Even though I couldn't do much I tryed my hardest and almost, almost succeeded to finish an actual game - stupid BASIC started to remove my code when I was almost finished - featuring a stiff stickman made out of letters.


I imagine the players character probably looked something like this:
 O
 I__
 I
 /\
You could walk up to a point when you started to see the enemy.
 O                 O
 I__           __I
 I                   I
 /\                 /\
Now you were frozen. The only thing you could do were to fire your gun using 'space'.
When the bullet reached the enemy, the enemy would punch it back at you. You were supposed to do the same and after a few turns the enemy would fail to punch it back and get hit and die. Kinda like Zelda, the young me thought.

[the_dannobot]

The first game I wrote was for my first c++ class.  It was like Combat for the atari 2600, except it was a 4-player 2vs2 team based capture the flag.  Four players on one keyboard is fun as hell hahaha

[Cymon]

Oh, thank you for bringing this thread back up. My first game is now available for download. I made it a Christmas gift on Cymon's Games. It's called Gravity Whip. Enjoy.

working link

Thanks for that. Don't even know the name of my own game (Named back when 8 characters were the limit).

[ThetaGames]

Okay, my first game, made in GM6, was called "Set The Controls" (it was loosely based on the Pink Floyd song "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun").  Essentially, it was an attempt to make fake 3D in a space-shooter, but so many things were done wrong.  (like using different sprites as the enemy ships got closer).  There are three levels, in the first level you have to destroy an alien star, in the second level you have to defend the Earth from these aliens (they are pretty pissed off - you blew up their sun!).  In the third level, you have to destroy some base on Mars.

The game was so hard, I can't even beat it now without cheating (somehow I remember the cheat codes).  And, if you thought the gameplay and graphics were crude, then the music is something else.  Basically, I opened up Sound Recorder, hung my cheap microphone over one of the speakers of my old keyboard, pressed RECORD and played.  Therefore, much of the game's ten megabytes was the WAV music.

Oh, and there was voice acting too.  By me.



And if you want to try it . . .  (I created the executable from GM7, since I could only find the source.)

[genericuser]

The first "proper" game(i.e. not a test) I remember making was a Paratrooper clone, using The Games Factory. And it had blood and extra weapons too 

Haha, turns out I've got a screenshot of the thing:

[Hempuli‽]

The first "proper" game(i.e. not a test) I remember making was a Paratrooper clone, using The Games Factory. And it had blood and extra weapons too 

Haha, turns out I've got a screenshot of the thing:

The dead soldiers look awesome!

[Synnah]

I started learning to program in Atari BASIC when I was about 7 or 8 (In 1988, or thereabouts). A lot of my first 'games' were simple text 'adventures', usually set in space, where you were told things like, "You're flying a ship. Some asteroids are about to hit you. Do you want to shoot them? (Y/N)". In this particular instance, if you chose to shoot them, you would get an explodey sound effect, and a message saying how many asteroids you destroyed. This figure was generated randomly, but I wasn't very good with the RND command, and instead of generating a whole number, it would tell you that you destroyed 3.75685446 asteroids. If you chose not to shoot, you died. It's all classic stuff. I probably made about 5 or 6 in total, and eventually they got to a point where you had to make a number of decisions, but generally it was just a case of pressing Y.

My first 'actual' game was made in STOS BASIC on the Atari ST, much later (1996, or thereabouts), and was a very simple Space Invaders game; the concept was whittled down to a single enemy, always moving back and forward across the top of the screen, occasonally dropping bombs. The whole thing was drawn in ASCII. The enemies looked like:

<o>

And your craft looked like:

/T\

It was called Blastar. It was, obviously, rubbish.

[Duckmeister]

Don't think I can remember the first games I made, but I do remember the first game I made for a competition, it was for a school, I believe using game maker 6 (it was supposed to tie in with a new class on learning how to make games with game maker 6, kinda lame).  Since I already knew the software, decided what the heck, might as well join it.  So I made a really nice, up-beat geometry wars clone, which had some nice exploits in it (both intentional and unintentional), like forcing blues to spawn themselves into the wall...

I think I came in second, got beat by a kid who made a really lame breakout clone.  Biggest complaint for my game was that there wasn't any more levels... 

[Mr_Seth]

"TimeQuest".

It was a QBasic text adventure, where the player was an amnesiac time-traveling Jedi parody. There was little plot, about 15 minutes of gameplay, and the entire thing was written with IF#=/THEN GOTO/PRINT commands. It was horrendous, and was aptly released on the AOL Games boards.

I was actually planning a follow up called "TimeQuest: The Empire Has Gas" involving the player sneaking onto a star destroyer analog and planting sedative gas canisters in the ventilation system, but I couldn't wrap my grade-school intellect around how to make it work.

Later on I got into ZZT; my games there were a bit more complex and satisfying - in the same way that a Whopper is better than a Big Mac. Technically a victory, but both are still pretty shabby choices. None of my ZZT games were ever finished, and they usually suffered from horrendous flow problems.