Your First Project... EVER!!!

[esper]

Since AGS is full of developers, I was wondering what everyone did when they first knew they wanted to produce games. What was the very first project you ever undertook, whether or not you completed it, and does it even exist anymore?

I remember back in the day, when I was only seven years old, tapping away at my keyboard on my Commodore 64 (the keyboard on a Commodore 64 WAS the Commodore 64) typing out simple BASIC to make a game like ZORK, the first video game I ever played. I believe I called it Castle Quest, and it was a simple eight-room castle adventure with no real puzzles... just exploration. I followed it up shortly afterward with a choose-your-own-adventure style Fantastic Four game which featured a pretty big maze in Doctor Doom's dungeon, and then made the first game I ever gave away to someone when I was ten: an expanded version of Castle Quest with some puzzles and simple spells.

I also remember lying to my friend Rusty telling him I made the game Mondu's Fight Palace (Tongue of the Fatman) with a lightpen... But all of that was lost when my parents sold my Commodore and accompanying 1521 floppy diskette drive at an auction. For a lousy 20 bucks, I might add.

So, what was the first ever game or first couple games you ever made? What started what is at this point a seemingly lifelong obsession? And is it still around, lying dormant and forgotten on some untravelled sector of your hard drive?

[Kinoko]

Cirque de Zale

Maaaan, I remember that old thing. Phew, had some adventure since then!

(Sorry for the sarcasm. I really don't belong in this thread)

[esper]

 :o :o :o :o :o
Cirque de Zale was your first game... EVER?

Whoah.... ::hangs head in shame for even referencing BASIC:

[Kinoko]

Pff, it just means I'm not as hardcore as you guys who thought of making games when you were kids.

[Ashen]

I haven't finished a game, ever. My first serious (abandonded) project, however, was a "Red Dwarf" based text adventure, done in AMOS. It was going to be based on the first book (Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers), and 'inspired' by Infocom's Hitchhikers Guide game. I wrote a lot of ideas down, but quickly got bored and frustraited by the actual programming part - which is ironic since I can do AGS code till the cows come home, but never have any bloody ideas.

[TheYak]

Commodore 64 was my first jump into it.  Though, not getting much further in Basic at that point than the flying birds tutorial, I stuck with making ANSI-style animations using basic print/goto commands.   I attempted a zork-style game (complete with Inventory and ANSI-graphic map) on my 8086, but had to give up after I couldn't find some coding glitches that destroyed the whole parser system.

I actually gave up on the idea for some time (apart from Wolfenstein graphics/levels and Doom .WADs) until finding AGS in '99 or '00, I forget when.  I leapt into a project, made design documents, realized that I was naive and untalented and promptly scrapped everything.  'twas my first foray into the Critic's section on the EZBoard site, and a pretty decent experience at that, prompting me to start & ditch my own projects on a regular basis.  I really need a manager or lead designer to keep me honest & working. 

[Nine Toes]

*Tries to remember*

I've had so many projects that I wanted to do, worked on them some, and then just lost interest in them... Even before AGS came into my life.

Well, these 3 are the earliest I can remember.
- Pre-AGS - A knock-off of "Solar Winds".  I thought that game rocked, so I started making my own sprites of ships, then I just kinda forgot about it.
- A zombie game.  (Who'da thunk it?)  It was supposed to be this huge 3d game, with all sorts of guns... I never got any farther than drawing some crap for it on a pad of notebook paper.  ...Wait, I did make some isometric backgrounds, and I ripped off these anime-looking avatars (I forget the site) and modified them, and made a small one-room demo, but nothing more than that.  That accidentally got deleted.
- The first AGS game I remember working on (actually WORKING ON, not just saying that I was working on it), was a game called "...Am I Evil?".  It was about a guy who had a split personality (much like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).  I was going to incorporate this "Anger Meter" which would force the main character to switch personalities, totally changing the plot of the game until he became his normal self again (I found out later that "Grr... Bearly Sane" already used this idea).  I made some rooms and sprites, but then lost interest and gave up on it.  The sprites are now being used (although slightly modified) in "The Dead Walk!" (yes, I'm still working on that one... no, seriously!...).

[Pet Terry]

Petteri presents...

My first graphic adventure (I had made some text adventures and non adventures before)... Stanley Raider! *comedy trumpet*

Heavily inspired by Zak McKracken which I was playing a lot back then (years ago).

Plot
Stanley Raider... [censored for being too embarassing] ...invisible man... [no!] ...aliens... [o_O] ...dream... [does it never end?] ...sunglasses and a golden statue... [nooooo].

Screenies (or more like backgrounds)
A city.
A corridor.
A beach.
A room with a television.
A house on the hill (my favourite)

My friend was making the backgrounds for me, he rocked and still rocks. There were some more backgrounds but I couldn't find them. I have some music too, but "it's so baaaad". This game was going to be made in Darkbasic, btw. so it's pre-AGS.

[Anarcho]

If you're talking strictly "games", i used to make up sort of role playing games with my sister.  I'd make a fort out of blankets and call myself a wizard.  But if you're talking computer games, I suppose my first "project" was an AGS game about a guy in medieval england that gets amnesia and becomes a brigand.  At some point he encounters a lone woman and child on a back road, robs them, then kills them.  Then at some point gets his memory back and realizes he killed his wife and child.  Then goes on some kind of rampages/soul seeking journey.  I really didn't know how to draw back then, and it was too big a project to start with, so I dropped it and moved onto what became Emily Enough.  But Emily Enough was several projects in and of itself, considering I redrew all the graphics probably half a dozen times.

[Nikolas]

Ok. my first computer was an AMSTRAD 1512, back at the age were Comodore rulled, and AMIGA didin't exist (something like 1986/7?)

Anyway my only knowledge was BASIC, thus:

SOLO, a huge game and a huge success, for myself only.
Tetris with colours
And, actually a decent little game called "squares".

In "squares" there were 30 different levels in a 10x10 grid box with walls, switches, movable walls and all other weird stuff, and all you had to do is pass from every free square twice. The catch was that you couldn't pass a third time, so you had to think before you acted.

Note that in all games the movement was made with the cursor keys, with the NumLock pressed cause I didn't know how to use the On Key command. So the movement was basically with 2, 4, 6 and 8!

I might just throw the last one in the critics lounge, although it's not an AGS game, but I think it's worth trying... Can a moderator tell me if I can do that?

[Darth Mandarb]

I used to program BASIC on my old Atari ...

Ahhh the memories!

I made an elaborate G.I. Joe adventure once.  Had 10 disks.  There were 9 different characters you could choose from.  The adventure was basically the same but each disk was a different character (didn't quite understand the concept of character variables back then!)

We made so many games in BASIC ... I can't even remember them all.

[Totoro]

I made a simple game on WIndows 3,1 using Klick&Play. It basically had Frosis, some comic characters I was drawing and giving to my friends in school then, were riding a car and you had to run over bicycles. It had "The Entertainer" as opening music, so I guess it was pretty cool  Mmmh, that must be more than 10 years ago...

[Nikolas]

Since there are so many old games (and not adventures), might I propose to make a topic and put everything in there, so our talent as youngers can reshine?

[Squinky]

I did the basic thing too, cept I just copied crap from a magazine and the junk nearly never worked.....My dad put me up to it, why else would an 8 year old kid type a page of code up for 5 hours just to get goddamned error messages. Thats why I love ags and it's ability to take you right to the error in the code.

I spent most of my childhood designing knockoffs of my favorite games with my own twist pretty much, I'd draw out all the screens and hang em on my wall in order.....I also made a lot of similair comics....

The first real game making I did was about when I was 20ish. I made some click'n'play junk, and had it all rigged up to make an adventure game, but it was really not made for it and I stumbled upon ags....Then I made Pirate Fry...

[MillsJROSS]

Ace Quest was my first attempt at making a game. It took me a while to find an engine that I liked. I remember downloading AGS, when it was in dos mode, and then promptly deleting it. Then upon searching and not finding anything good, I came back to it, lived with the fact that it was dos, and made a game. It should also be noted that I was extremely happy and suprised when a Window version came out.

AQ wasn't really the first idea I had for a game. I didn't really even know exactly what I wanted to make, but as I explored the features and made one room, everything started panning out in my mind.

-MillsJROSS

[Andail]

I also tried to make Ace Quest, but Mills beat me to it. And he never really stopped rubbing it in my face either.

PS: And yeah, Nikolai, you can post stuff in the critics even if it's not ags-related.

[Bernie]

If it's the first FINISHED game we're talking about here, then it would be my recently released platformer 'A Game with a Kitty' for me, made for Kinoko's first 'Release Something'-Thread.

What got me into game making was a demo of Klik & Play I found on a magazine CD a few years back. It had an awesome sprite editor which I still use, for AGS game sprites as well. I searched for a more recent version of KnP and found Multimedia Fusion, and I still use it for making platformers and other, more simple games. Two years ago I found AGS and joined the boards. My first AGS project was City of Fortune but it never saw the light of the day.

Before all that I messed around with my C64, coding small programs and sequences, but I'm not sure if that counts.

I don't think I'll stop making games anytime soon. It's fun.

[Babar]

My first COMPLETE game would probably be a pong clone I did on BASIC. What was innovative about it? It had a story:

THE PLANET HJOUP, THE GALAXY'S SOURCE OF ENERGY HAS GOTTEN TO MUCH ENERGY. YOU AND YOUR FRIEND GYIL MUST BLOCK IT FROM LEAVING THE GALAXY WITH YOUR SHIPS TILL IT RUNS OUT OF EXCESS ENERGY. GOOD LUCK!

[Paper Carnival]

Heh... I was like 9, I had no internet, no experience or what-so-ever... My first game was an adventure game made in MS PowerPoint . After I got internet, I found out about a 2d fighting engine called MUGEN, I experimented with it but I didn't go far. Then, finally, I found out about Game Maker, which I used for years but unfortunately never managed to finish a single game that was worth it. I'm good at scripting, but too damn lazy at the designing, so I usually make the basic engine of games and leave it there.

So my first project was a crappy, unfinished adventure made in MS Paint and my first finished project was a small space game made with GM.

I also did some experimenting in VB and Pascal, I made some silly casino-like games in VB but had no success in Pascal at all.

[esper]

Isn't PASCAL a business language only, like FORTRAN?

Anyway, there are a lot of BASIC programmers in here, huh? As soon as I get my old compy back from New Hampshire I can upload some of the few finished executable BASIC games I ever made... I don't even remember which ones I did right now, but I think that would be cool. So what about following Nik's suggestion: everybody dig up some old game you never released, put it into a compilable (even if not finished) form and share it with the community?

I remember 99% of what I did was ZORK clones and character creation engines for games I never made...