Your First Project... EVER!!!

[Paper Carnival]

yeah, but that doesn't make it unable to make any games at all

[Barbarian]

Oh boy... you bunch of young whipper-snappersÃ, 
Ã,  Ã, I guess my first game I make was like some kind of pongish/breakout clone on the old Commodore-PET machine. Ack! AM I really THAT old? Heheh.

Then I got myself a Vic-20. I spent so much time on that old 'puter, became fairly expert at programming BASIC on it, and made so many little games on it. When I was around 16 years-old, I even had a little "Dive Bomber" game selling in a computer store... basically you flew your little airplane over ships below you in the water, and as they shot at you, you tried to bomb them.

But, I guess one of my biggest accomplishment on the ol' Vic-20 was a RPG type of game, I called it "Lost Labyrinth". It was similar in format to "Sword of Fargoal" for any of you who remembers that kool little RPGish Hack-Slash 'ventureÃ, 

I also made several text-based adventure, along the line of the various Scott Adams text-based adventure games. In fact the very first "Adventure Game" I ever played and owned was Scott Adams "Adventureland", which at the time really captured my imagination, and help to make me become interested in programming my own games. So, I wrote several games like that, but with an attempt to add in my own crudely drawn *graphics* for each scene by using the various ASCII characters available to draw them on the computer.

Later I moved up to the C=64, then the Amiga and also made some games on those computers as well.. then, as life's been a real adventure in itself for many years, I got away from programming that kind of stuff for several years, untill just a few years ago I became interested/inspired to try my hand at it once again. My first made-with-AGS game being "Escape From Evergreen Forest", then moving onto "The Great Stroke-Off!" and "The Elevator", with a couple of other projects currently in the works.

Perhaps some of those old games may yet still be around on some old cassettes or floppies packed in some old boxes "back home" half a world away, but then again, over the years, those little things tend to have a habit of "dissapearing" when you leave that kind of stuff in storage at a house with a somewhat large family.Ã,  So, perhaps some of my old first games I made are lost forever, but, well, the good old memories, and the interest of programming games still remains with me.Ã, 

[magintz]

Well the first thing I did when I got AGS was to fiddle around with various buttons. I then drew 2 backgroudns, the inside and outside of a house, and you found a key under the doormat and entered the hosue. Once I had done this I deleted it all and started fresh with my first project - POINT BLANK

Point Blank was an idea I thought up out of laziness. How can I have a player character that requires no animating... so i thought "why not a flying robot". I then though that robots are more in the future so I made a sci-fi game out of it. An evil computer virus accidently slipped into a maintenace droid whilst unloading some cargo from a ship. You are kidnapped blah blah blah. I gave up once I lost everything when my computer died on me.

Demo - This was all that got made.

Screenshot


Since then I've done numerous projects including blue death, a murder mystery type game. The Zero Hero, still in production. Jingle Bells, my MAGS winning entry for xmags. And am currently making a pirate game. wooo be amazed.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Ahhh, the memories... my first evert project was a QBASIC version of Mystery House. It went rather smoothly, though. All things considered.

My second ever REAL project was LSL2 Point and Click. Thankfully that one got done.

[Akumayo]

Why did you bring up this terrible memory?Ã,  I once created a game...called.... Future CD Adventure.Ã,  I produced it at 12 years old.Ã,  You played as a CD.Ã,  Yes, a plain, grey CD.Ã,  Your character had only that one walking frame, and there was NO background color.Ã,  That's right, you were a CD, encased in a white block.Ã,  You had to solve stupid puzzles that involved nothing more than walking from hotspot to hotspot, sometimes being teleported to rediculous places and having to backtrack.Ã,  You had to collect other, differently colored CD's encased in white boxes that not only followed you around, but mysteriously appeared in your inventory as well.Ã,  I really hated that game when I finished it, and it almost killed my Adventure spirit...then came Coin Rush -shudders-

[InCreator]

QBasic!
Ow, I remember lots of MS Gorillas remixes, remakes and modifications. First game was - if I remember correctly, "guess the number I'm thinking"-text game, in QBasic. And then some snake-games.

But then the "Worms!" came out and all my hopes to make something as cool were crushed.

Then, lot's of Game Makering... at the time where Mark Overmars acutally listened to suggestions and answered e-mails. And engine was free! In version 4.2 or 4.3, most of implementations were my own suggestions...

Good times.

[m0ds]

When I was about 12 I found and loved QBasic, which soon became a popular platform for the geeks at school to try and make their own games. There was about 8 official game-makers in secondary school. One of the first programs I made was "It's A Dillon!!" - which produced a word on the screen for 3, then 2, then 1 second - depending on the level of difficulty, and you then had to type in the word you just saw, if you could remember it!

The first game I worked on collaborativly was "Sim Car", with a Mr Chris Gilbert back when we started our first venture; Danger Zone. Sim Car was a crappy racing game, where you picked someone up and took them to their desired location as quick as you could. Of course, this was in QB, so we're talking top down, circle for a car, lines for a city and X's for people and drop-off points. And of course the car had no momentum, you just had to keep your finger on numpad 2 to keep it moving down

With that I worked on a couple of top down adventures, one was called A Rather Strange Adventure, inspired by LBA.

But my first, personal project, and what I had tried to get our team of geeks to do was an adventure game. And although we tried to create an adventure called "The Max", it never got further than a bunch of QB drawn backgrounds. It wouldn't have been a point and click anyway, so bweh. I somehow learnt how to incorporate mouse into QBasic, and my first major project was Broken Glass. The art was ASCII & the mouse only worked if you held both buttons down (I believe it used the Pen feature) - hotspots genuinly worked and the GUI partially worked, it was a major breakthrough for me personally and also to the others, because they hadn't really ventured further than text inputs and lists of options in their games

I remember about 6 screens in, there was a bug which I could never fix, and so that version was scrapped, but still exists as a .bas file on my old HD (which is in storage!). Nevertheless, I worked on a second version, after learning yet MORE nifty QB features. By that time I could include background midi music, a working mouse cursor and wav file support which allowed me to make a very crude talkie. The GUI worked more beautifully than I'd ever expected. THEN, out of nowhere, came the internet! And I never continued it since

As you'd expect (I guess, you bastards!) it was never finished, though funnily enough I've always kept the idea alive AND hopefully, with the help of Nacho & some animators - a full 16bit version will be released in the near future. Some of you are fully aware that I've been designing it and some have seen sketches for the backgrounds. I don't know whether it was because it was the first I designed or just an idea I liked that kept me in the mood for creating it. I took a computer home from work late last year with the soul intention of working on more QB games, but after little success at finding a QB artist I didn't bother. Why not use AGS you may ask? Well, because I enjoyed coding the engine so much - and it was a QB engine that hadn't been designed before. The only problem was, you couldn't click and make the character move. No man, that stuff is well beyond me

I could chat for hours about this, all the projects I've worked on yet not succeeded. But I never class that as a bad thing myself, I have tons of experience, and one day I'll have a perfect balance of knowledge, support and resources to finish a game!

[Ghormak]

you just had to keep your finger on numpad 2 to keep it moving down

Hehe, you just described 80% of my QBasic games!

Technically, I guess I started on the C64 programming in basic, but those "games" were nothing more than slightly interactive crude ascii animations of stickmen.

[Snake]

The very first game I attempted making and got almost finished was a zombie text adventure called, "Evil Night" - using the Adventure Game Toolkit. I spent hours at school mapping out the rooms and when I got home (fuck the homework) I'd work on it. The game was pretty near finished with pictures of items and pictures for the cutscenes. It was fucking awesome and it was something that I was GOING TO FINISH - I was fucking proud of myself for once in my life... not that anyone else would have played it, but yeah, I was proud of myself. I ended up getting a newer computer and somehow lost the disks with everything on them and the hardrive for the computer that the game was saved on was junk... FUCK! Lost forever. I got a disk with the early version, but it's only like 5% finished. VLARGHETTY!!1

-between here and AGS I used Qbasic for a while making an RPG called, Realm of Evil" which was cool too... never finished after I found AGS-

When I found AGS - since my real pasion was for graphic adventures - the first game I started making was, "The Life of Marty Shore" (inspired by Willy Beamish)... never finished of course.... what's new till this day anyway? Jack Shit is what's been accomplished.

Boy, I gotta go before I get emotional


--Snake

[m0ds]

Snake, can you create a sequel called "The Life of Matty Shore" ? Because then I can relate it to a real person!

[DragonRose]

My first ever "adventures" were simple choose your own adventure type things written out on paper. I even sewed them up into little books.

My first ever computer adventure was a HyperCard game I made for Social Sciences class. You could talk to people and they would say random facts about the Incas. That was pretty much it. I got an awful mark on the project because the teacher had never played an adventure game and couldn't get the idea of "click on the door to open it" through his head.

[scotch]

Like a lot of people, my first taste of game making was in BASIC, for me it was on the C64.Ã,  But back then I just liked to make the computer do stuff, I wasn't really trying to make games other people would like to play, just silly "text adventures" and balls bouncing around the screen.

Later on when I got my first PC (about 8 years ago, I'm a n00b), I got into pixel graphics, I made animations in Action 2.5 (which was meant for powerpoint type presentations, but you could do so much more), and very simple games in Klik n play.Ã,  When I got my second PC, which had a 3d chipset, I got into 3d modelling, after a month of doing that I got involved with a project called Chronos V, which was an ambitious amateur RPG/FPS, it was actually very nice quality for the time, with its own 3d engine (the first I saw pixel shaders in) and a team with a few pro developers in it, and got rather far before various problems forced us to stop development.

After this I was bored, I didn't have a project to work on, so I messed about in free engines.Ã,  I found Game Maker, and AGS, both of which are really nice to use, of course the AGS community hooked me on this side.Ã,  My first AGS project... what was that, hm.Ã,  I guess the first I can remember is Alien Rape Escape Which was started as a team hour game on IRC.Ã,  Since then I've done graphics for various games.Ã,  All the projects up to now had been other peoples projects, so really I still hadn't started my first project.Ã,  Not until recently.

Last year I decided I wanted to get back into 3d, and I wanted to make games that weren't clones of old games, too much game theory discussion with AGSers perhaps.Ã,  Unfortunately there were no 3d adventure game engines around that were worth using, so I set about making my own, in C++, which I did not know.Ã,  I... well, I couldn't finish the engine then, a few things stumped me.Ã,  But it taught me C++, which is nice because it allowed me to start a real game project this summer.Ã,  Cave Rider, is going to be a mostly 2d game to keep things simpler, and is going to be an action game, to cut down the amount of writing I need to do I hope it'll be good, because it's the first game I've attempted to make alone.

[Helm]

hm hm first interactive bit of whatever done on my own computer would be various simple games made in the klick and play demo I had, in which I couldn't SAVE so I had to redo them all to play them again. At some point I could whip out a basic mario clone in 10 minutes in the demo. That was fun. strangely I understood and had made pixel art before I dabbled in games so my time with simple platformers that sucked in knp was a fun one, without as much confusion as one would expect. 5 computers or somthing since nothing remains to show for it though besides some lamented art.

<- named 'room.bmp' originally. Ah, when you've made no games and you don't know the unwritten rules of resource naming. Not even room01, not even room1. But 'room'. distinctive. From this to AA_SStation_001.png. This was for some sort of little computer people clone I was trying to make in games factory. Was I insane? Gave up on the sprite, thankfully. Note the wonderful 3 meter tall steps.

I even made a semi-adventure game thing in games factory where you were in a cave, and there were some grayed out action buttons like 'get' 'push' etc and when you moved your character sprite within some invisible boundries of an object some of the buttons would light up and you could click them. Did a simple 'get key, open door' puzzle like that and got bored. It was like a very strange and primitive AGI control sceme but with akward mouse control for verbs over it. Awful, generally. At that point, I googled 'adventure game maker"

  <- games factory test room art wee. Also used for the first ags project below. note the wonderful colour theory and amazing usage of negative space.

Then ags. First project was 'CAVE' which was basically the same as above, one cave room, one simple key door puzzle to see how it works, just so much easier to make that I fell in love.

First 'OMG I'LL MAKE A GAYME' project was an untitled thing I was making very seriously at the time, with ripped gfq2 sprites but a lot of love and work in it otherwise. For a 17 year old or how old I was I can't remember I think of it fondly. As usual, I gave up on it because I didn't like my graphics.

Then Snail Quest 1 - 3 for lols mostly. Back then the ags scene was different.

Then Crown of Gold and etc etc

ah! this image spawned SOL:




named SPACE.bmp haha.

This one was much, much later remade in EGA and the pic was good. Can't find it now, though.

[Pet Terry]

I found my first ever AGS games!

Beware.

Old, old stuff, made back in 2001. I think there should be music playing in the background, but I don't hear it on XP. Also, ph33r my l337 animating skills!

Haha, I remember having so much trouble when trying to figure out how to add inventory items to your inventory. Oh, memories.

[Chicky]

After many reformat's this was all i could find of my old work:




This was my first proper project with ags, and like many others i jumped in with my hands and legs behind me. It was going to be teh uber leet 200 room game that would pwn ags. But all it is now is two small pictures each coming in at less than 20kb.

Been using ags for 4 years now and still havnt managed to finish a half decent game.

[IM NOT TEH SPAM]

Goose Quest.  Not Goose Quest 1, but Goose Quest.  The goose sprite was a picture I found on google with a mspaint drawn cape.  The houses were all huts found on google as well, and all backrounds were stolen from QFGIV, with an intro screen stolen from... QFGV!  There were absolutely no puzzles but you could talk to a duck and recieve an old dinasaur bone... picture stolen, courtesy of google.com.  I don't have anything left from that game since I turned my old crappy computer into the best one in the house.

I wasn't even part of the community when I made this.  I lost my password to Lord_Nipper, which stopped me from wasting any time posting on these forums.

[Kal-El]

Chicky, I remember seeing those screenshots about a year and a half back or something on these here forums, lol.

I remember coding most of my first games when I was about 6 or 7 on my Spectrum +2. Using 128 BASIC I would simply copy code out of 'make your own game' books, each time editing certain things to see what would happen.

I remember making little crappy games of all my favourite childhood things, like: Superman, Batman, Scooby Doo, The Flintstones, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles etc.

I then learnt about Q-BASIC on the PC. This is where I made the first-ever version of 'Dick LaRenzo: Secret Agent!'. It was followed by the sequel 'Dick LaRenzo 2'.

I've since dabbled in 3D GameStudio and more recently, AGS.