A recent topic got me thinking about old games I programmed before BYOND... so now I'm wondering, what was everyone's first game project, at BYOND or elsewhere?
The first game I ever programmed (to a playable state) was on my Commodore 64 and had the title of (and I wish I was joking when I say this) "Ninja vs Evil". Forgive me, I was only 11 at the time. It was s side-scroller where you threw daggers at various ninja (there were three types, each with different weapons). You had three "ninja skills"--one was invisibility, one was jumping, and the other I don't remember. The game really only took a few minutes to beat, but it was nifty nonetheless.
At BYOND, my first playable game was a little graphical chat room, which I only made because Theodis made me.
-AbyssDragon
ID:192800
 May 15 2002, 8:37 am
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"experimentor2", later renamed to "The Experimentor" was my first game on BYOND. Despite being my pathetic attempt at a first try, some people still liked it. I had a number of people bugging me for special positions like captain of the guard, etc... And the rest of em just wanted to be GMs. Anyway, it was a silly little game where you logged in and I turned you into one of several different icons. At the time, I didn't know how to let you set your own, so I had to set them for you. And they all danced.
There were also a number of silly items, weapons, armor and doodads that could be found throughout the tiny map which consisted of a town, a small forest trail, and two dungeons. And an orcish camp and an empty plain full of whisps. You gained experienced in the form of increasing skills like, the more you walked around the more your stamina increased, and the more you got beat up the more your health increased. Fun. Of course, it suffered from perpetually-moving-monster-syndrome, which meant lots of lag. But hey, it was fun to find that the Midnight Creatures would attack the village while you weren't expecting it. It was fun to watch the guards get slaughtered at the claws of a giant black hulking thing with wings. ;o) | |
Sadly, yet surely, My first BYOND game was a Dragonball game named Secret Fusion Chronicles *I believe the original name was 'Force Alpha'" Anyway this was my first game and later i made Eyes of the Myst *Something i could be more proud of*. Those were my first two.
My first ever game was a small SWR text mud called Legend of the Jedi *I used to love star wars*. --Ken | |
AbyssDragon wrote:
A recent topic got me thinking about old games I programmed before BYOND... so now I'm wondering, what was everyone's first game project, at BYOND or elsewhere? I did a few little games on my Atari as a kid, though pretty much none of note. My first real game--the first I approached seriously, so that I actually finished it--was PlunderMine. I've considered redoing that in BYOND but as I understand it, better mining games like Delve and Miner League (to say nothing of Lode Wars) have already appeared. Too bad I didn't see those, but the genre seems used and anyway PlunderMine was a concept in desperate need of an update. After PlunderMine I made fairly good progress on an asteroid game called The Belts. This, like PlunderMine, was a DOS game and used the old "mode 19" (320x200x256). I used POV-Ray to render graphics for the ships (in 24 directions) and the asteroids, plus I did a little work on some nifty explosions and even had a particle system. Besides dual cannons (that you could fire in alternating or dual mode, the latter with energy loss) the ship also had shielding (a real energy hog), a gravitic tractor (cool for pushing asteroids into enemy ships), and an emergency hyperdrive for escaping a bad situation. But the coolest thing by far was that I tweaked the sound system (whose code unfortunately was buggy on some computers--I never did find out why) to string together words of a computer voice that would deliver damage reports and warnings: "Hull critical. Thrusters and shields damaged." "Gravitics upgrade." "Enemy ship detected." "Repairs underway." "Friendly ship destroyed." "Repairs complete." "Hyperdrive failure." The clipped pattern to the speech had a nice sound to it. For the voice I asked my sister to speak about 20 different words, and then I added a delayed overlap effect (at 11,025 Hz, 4 copies of the word were averaged 100 samples apart). Words were separated by a 1/10 second pause. I have no idea if this voice effect can be fudged in BYOND; in a newer version of the game written for Windows I'd just allocate a chunk of memory and splice the wavs together. In BYOND that's not strictly feasible, and timing issues would screw up the way the sounds were played. (A sound queue on a channel would be nice, or maybe providing a list, but I'm not asking for one.) Anyway, I've actually looked a little bit into taking this to BYOND, since 1) I think the multiplayer aspects would be really cool, and 2) pixel movement is now possible. So far about all I've done is generate nice starfield turfs (it's a cool algorithm) and set up a system whereby objects move at their current velocity automatically and can wrap around the screen. Lummox JR | |
(A sound queue on a channel would be nice, or maybe providing a list, but I'm not asking for one.) I'm about 51% certain that this has already been added. And I'm 49% in the mood to send someone on a wild goose chase through the release notes. | |
Despite the fact that the default (and only scenario) for the original Delve! was titled "The Abandoned Mine", it never actually had anything to do with digging.
Don't feel bad, though; most of the people who actually were around during the original Delve!'s lifespan still don't remember what it was (for which I'm thankful, because the near-universal reaction from those who do remember it has been pestering). | |
Gughunter wrote:
(A sound queue on a channel would be nice, or maybe providing a list, but I'm not asking for one.) Oh gads, there it is: Format: sound(file,repeat=0,wait,channel) Args: file: A sound file to play, or null to halt sound on the specified channel. repeat: 1 to play sound repeatedly. wait: 0 to interrupt current sound on channel; 1 to wait in queue channel: 0 for any available channel, 1-8 for specific channel (wavs only) Of course now I wonder, if you interrupt the current sound on the channel, does it cancel the rest of the queue? (That's the behavior I'm hoping for.) Lummox JR | |
Well it was known as DBZ Gods, after about 3 days it was out of the hub and gone =). It was not a whole hearted attempt at a game but none the less it was an attempt and a first game =D
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Heh... 1991. 10th grade Pascal class. The game was called "Skate Rat Hunter" and it was a clone of "Spy Hunter" with really poor graphics (and the juvenile theme of taking out skateboarders with your machine-gun equipped sports car).
This was followed up by "Battle Checkers" (a two-player game of checkers with animated attack sequences) for my final class project. There were also a number of minor games written for an assortment of college courses, but my piece de resistance was something I wrote on my own time: "Sabacc for Windows". A shareware card game that can still be found floating around online. Regards, Corporate Dog | |
My first game of note I made when I was about 16 on my brother's Apple II. It was called "Take the Money and Run," and was ASCII graphics :-)
It was kind of funny because I had items that were represented by letters or symbols (some reversed black/white), and some of those would appear in signs on the street. You had to realize you could take the letter off the sign, and it functioned as the object, hehe. It was actually a pretty fun game! | |
First game? Wow, that takes me back awhile. My family's first computer was an IBM PC/XT. 4 MHz processor, 256k memory, and an astounding 10 MB hard disk. I couldn't believe you could fit that many bytes in there, nor fathom what you might do with all that! I was given my very own 360k floppy disk, and I never ran out of space on it.
My first program was a little BASIC program that spewed out stupid lines of text ("FUN!!!", "DESTROY!!!", etc) over and over in a little loop. Hey, I was 8 years old, you do better! I thought it was awesome. I soon moved on to my most lucrative project - turning those little Mad Libs books into computer games. Each Mad Lib was hard coded into the program, and I had to be really careful, or I'd run out of line numbers! It provided hours and hours of entertainment for me and my friends. I recall we went through a period where every "noun" was replaced with the words "private parts" and we laughed hysterically about it. My greatest achievement on that old computer was my simulation of V: The Final Battle. It was 5th grade, and my best friend and I were obsessed with the series. To draw the opening logo, I made a bunch of filled in polygons and ovals on the screen. Basically trial and error until it looked about right. It took about 5 seconds to fully draw as you watched it fill in. To animate the mother ship, I drew an oval on the screen, printed a bunch of blank lines to erase it, then drew it in a new place. Talk about great animation! Fast forward to college. I'd uselessly learned Pascal in an introductory class (I remember being wowed that you could write a program without line numbers) and wanted to learn C on my own over the summer of '93. I wanted to write a Pac-Man clone, but that turned out to be too hard. Instead, I wrote "Tag" for Borland's C compiler for DOS. It even had a text file format for the levels so you could make your own without touching the source code (a big improvement from my Mad Libs design!). I probably still have that program buried on a backup CD somewhere... I wonder if it still runs? First BYOND game? Una. | |
A recent topic got me thinking about old games I programmed before BYOND... so now I'm wondering, what was everyone's first game project, at BYOND or elsewhere? My first game was written for my 7th grade math class on an Apple II, but I'm not sure if it was "Monarchy" or "Herbie the Cow's Big Adventure". "Monarchy" was a text-only game that would let you expand your kingdom by correctly answering simple randomly-generated math questions. "Herbie" was a fast action game (by which I mean a painfully slow action game) about a cow whose pasture was on a hill below a leaky nuclear plant. """""""""""""""""" It'd look more accurate if I used the same character for everything -- each of the text characters shown above was actually a different color of the Apple's mammoth low-res pixels. On the VIC-20 (and later the C-64), I'm pretty sure my first game was Ferryboat. I followed it up with a string of never-seen-anywhere classics like Anthill, Plagueround, Little China Cups, Grain Elevator, Caverns of Epovotic, Collapse of the Federation, and at least five or six others whose names I can't recall. | |
Air Mapster wrote:
First game? Wow, that takes me back awhile. My family's first computer was an IBM PC/XT. 4 MHz processor, 256k memory, and an astounding 10 MB hard disk. Heh. My Commodore 64 had only 64k RAM, and no hard disk. I was given my very own 360k floppy disk, and I never ran out of space on it. I know.. disks in those days were awesome. I remember having disks that held collections of games--sometimes ten or twenty at a time. -AbyssDragon | |
Actually, now that I think of it, I wrote a game in GW-Basic that allowed you to manage your colony (1700's colony) by choosing one of five options every turn. After each turn, random things would happen, like you'd be raided by indiands, something would burn down, there would be a flood or a storm, or nothing at all. If I recall, you could build barracks that would train soldiers to help ward off indian attacks, or you could build houses, or storage areas, or something like that.
I don't remember. I just recall there was one thing you could build over and over and win the game easily. Actually, much like my late Distant World game, you'd just go for the biggest colony you could get until you could no longer manage to feed all your colonists and they'd eventually die. After that, I gave up on games and wrote a random dice roller. | |
AbyssDragon wrote:
A recent topic got me thinking about old games I programmed before BYOND... so now I'm wondering, what was everyone's first game project, at BYOND or elsewhere? My first game I programmed I made on an old Texas Instruments computer. It was a game where it generated a number between 1 and 100 and the player had to guess it. If you guessed wrong it would tell you if you were too high or too low. | |
Theodis wrote:
AbyssDragon wrote: LOL....Texas rocks! | |
My first game was from a tutorial that created a simple 7x7 QBASIC pac-man text world. However I quickly expanded it to include a gigantic map. I do mean gigantic too. It was around 20x50 tiles. There were side warps, pac-man only doors, ghost-only doors, invincibility items, walk through wall capabilities. I even used ascii characters for walls. A wall was a filled in block. It looked nice. What made me even prouder was that it worked on a directory system with save files in /saves and levels in /levels. I even programmed in a level creater that generated user-made levels into the /levels directory. Also you had the option of editing a text file which contained the paths for the adventure mode levels. Editing it allowed you to add on to the adventure mode. I have the programs (player and level maker) in a zip file on some computer out there. I even added a manual and in game menus for fun. Sadly the ghost AI is severly dumb.
I think this is how my make-everything-dynamic attitude began. My first BYOND game is still-under development. | |
"DBZ: The Quest for Power" -- I really despise that game.
--Lee