I showed my friend Game Maker 5 in 2007. We were both pretty young. It was quite the time. We didn't understand variables yet, so we had this insane system where were used Game Makers score system for variables. Once we figured our variables we felt on top of the world. Though we never wrote our own GML. We used to decomp other games and take code we needed straight out of other games and blindly re-work it into our own projects. What a good time that was.
I got started making games in Qbasic. That code was horrendous, and is funny to read now. I did learn some lessons through my mistakes, though, and at a young age, which I think was very valuable.
I remember what a battle it was to 'figure it out' back then
If you were lucky, there was a tutorial how to do X. But requires tool Y. Where do you get Y? Here it is on some apache indexed site! Oh, I just installed Sp0rk3h. Well, time to reformat and reinstall Windows XP. Good thing I partitioned my 40gB HDD
The learning curve for Photoshop 7, when there are 0 resources was pretty tough. I remember how proud I was when I figured out how to make an animated gif. Hammer editor (Was it called Hammer? to make maps for Half-Life engine games like Counter-Strike), There was an editor for creating an archive of images. was it a .WAD archive?
That kind of self-directed learning without hand-holding, I think, is not a bad thing
I built some homebrew games for the PlayStation Portable circa 2004, in the middle of high school. I had some C and C++ knowledge, but barely knew what I was doing. Setting up the toolchain for building PSP homebrew on Windows XP involved a cygwin instance and all sorts of bizarre compiler and library packages that made almost zero sense to me at the time, and I had pretty much no Unix experience. I remember if I ever got linker errors, I'd just back up my source code (copy the whole dir to "game_backup_20040102" etc), delete everything, and re-do the entire installation from scratch, because I had no idea what a linker was or what the errors meant.
It's wild to me that I actually built and shipped two decent little games with that setup, lol. I put them on Itch a couple years ago: https://coldpie.itch.io/
As a kid I watched my mom produce plots in Microsoft Excel and even then as a first grader Microsoft Excel had a pretty steep learning curve. Some school computers had the whole creative suite, from Adobe stuff like Photoshop to Macromedia stuff like Freehand and Fireworks. All of these seemed overwhelming to me when I was in the first few years of elementary school.
Our school computers didn't have those but my friends and I figured out you could make animations in PowerPoint, using the extensive clip art libraries which were installed for some reason (don't remember my home computer's powerpoint having nearly that many images). Also for some reason the teachers would let us goof around for the whole hour during computer lab time every Thursday. To this day I still don't think I have laughed harder than at a particularly stupid one my friend made.
Klik/MMF were a godsend. Daily Click and other websites, super active forums. Lots of cool games.
Nice to see the list of people included on here, including FAIND (Fallen Angel Industries). So many great, fun games to come out of that crew. Joakim "Konjak" Sandberg is still going strong.
This was a world running parallel to things like RPG Maker, Game Maker and Flash. I'm glad someone did a write up of this, I hardly saved anything from those days.
If you like the website you should try his game mentioned there, Hypnospace Outlaw. It's hours of reading stuff like that. And you can get all the Granny Cream's Hot Butter Ice Cream you want.
When I was a kid making games, I used ZZT. My brother recently got back into it and started teaching his kids for to make ZZT games. I found the programming language too constrictive. It didn't have great support for things like variables and loops. I still enjoyed it. My brother reasoned that the small instruction set makes it easy for his kids to learn to code in it. I suppose that's true. But he never learned to code in higher level languages, so he doesn't really know how frustrating it is to have to write so much ZZT code to accomplish something which would be so simple in another language.
My earliest "gnarly bug" experience was that the "set flag" operations in ZZT are limited to 8 flags, but it doesn't throw an error if you exceed that limit; it just wraps to the zeroth flag. It took me a full year to figure it out as a ten-year old.
warms my heart to see this so high. that summer I was 10 and discovered ZZT and the surprirsingly robust editor and language was really where it all began for me tech-wise. and I was just thinking about it two days ago
The online groups where we made games together, the tons of ideas and concept art sketches in school notebooks, ZZT as someone else mentioned, the PACKARD BELL...
As a kid two years younger that also grew up in Florida, got obsessed with making games (though with the BYOND engine), created/deleted crappy but gradually less crappy games, eventually got into music and especially prog instead (pink floyd was my favorite band - dream theater was my first concert), had most likely undiagnosed ADHD (my assessment is actually tomorrow!), thought about going to Full Sail for either game dev or music production, this was a very fun read.
I started a bit earlier with QBasic. The coolest thing was using assembly to make code really fast. I understood exactly none of it, but thought that was the ultimate programming language and wanted to learn it one day.
Eventually I learned you don't really need it and felt a bit sad. Similar sadness I feel now that LLMs write all the code for you.
Whoever maintains this blog website should definitely improve the site's nostalgia theme to make the content more readable.
It could represent how the web was in the 90s, but it doesn't represent what readers like these days. I sent this post to my friend and said to just open it in reader mode. Our eyes are not as sharp as in the 90s my friend.
My favorite game-making experiences as a kid (early 90s) were:
- borrowing a BASIC game-making book from the library and hand-typing programs into QBASIC on my uncle's computer, trying to figure out how to translate the slightly-different BASIC dialect in the book on the fly
- making my own ZZT[0] games for an audience of one: myself. When I discovered the web later and learned that there was a huge community of ZZT makers out there, I was floored.
I have made several games as an adult, but none of those experiences has really been as much fun as those early ones.
Exactly! I read it on the phone and I enjoyed the nostalgic look of the page.
I was even thinking, this is what the web used to be.
If instead of this it was written on another Medium blog or as a bunch of tweets, it wouldn’t have had the same impact that it does for me. It is the way that it should be, for the story it is telling.
I showed my friend Game Maker 5 in 2007. We were both pretty young. It was quite the time. We didn't understand variables yet, so we had this insane system where were used Game Makers score system for variables. Once we figured our variables we felt on top of the world. Though we never wrote our own GML. We used to decomp other games and take code we needed straight out of other games and blindly re-work it into our own projects. What a good time that was.
I got started making games in Qbasic. That code was horrendous, and is funny to read now. I did learn some lessons through my mistakes, though, and at a young age, which I think was very valuable.
I remember what a battle it was to 'figure it out' back then
If you were lucky, there was a tutorial how to do X. But requires tool Y. Where do you get Y? Here it is on some apache indexed site! Oh, I just installed Sp0rk3h. Well, time to reformat and reinstall Windows XP. Good thing I partitioned my 40gB HDD
The learning curve for Photoshop 7, when there are 0 resources was pretty tough. I remember how proud I was when I figured out how to make an animated gif. Hammer editor (Was it called Hammer? to make maps for Half-Life engine games like Counter-Strike), There was an editor for creating an archive of images. was it a .WAD archive?
That kind of self-directed learning without hand-holding, I think, is not a bad thing
I built some homebrew games for the PlayStation Portable circa 2004, in the middle of high school. I had some C and C++ knowledge, but barely knew what I was doing. Setting up the toolchain for building PSP homebrew on Windows XP involved a cygwin instance and all sorts of bizarre compiler and library packages that made almost zero sense to me at the time, and I had pretty much no Unix experience. I remember if I ever got linker errors, I'd just back up my source code (copy the whole dir to "game_backup_20040102" etc), delete everything, and re-do the entire installation from scratch, because I had no idea what a linker was or what the errors meant.
It's wild to me that I actually built and shipped two decent little games with that setup, lol. I put them on Itch a couple years ago: https://coldpie.itch.io/
As a kid I watched my mom produce plots in Microsoft Excel and even then as a first grader Microsoft Excel had a pretty steep learning curve. Some school computers had the whole creative suite, from Adobe stuff like Photoshop to Macromedia stuff like Freehand and Fireworks. All of these seemed overwhelming to me when I was in the first few years of elementary school.
Our school computers didn't have those but my friends and I figured out you could make animations in PowerPoint, using the extensive clip art libraries which were installed for some reason (don't remember my home computer's powerpoint having nearly that many images). Also for some reason the teachers would let us goof around for the whole hour during computer lab time every Thursday. To this day I still don't think I have laughed harder than at a particularly stupid one my friend made.
Klik/MMF were a godsend. Daily Click and other websites, super active forums. Lots of cool games.
Nice to see the list of people included on here, including FAIND (Fallen Angel Industries). So many great, fun games to come out of that crew. Joakim "Konjak" Sandberg is still going strong.
This was a world running parallel to things like RPG Maker, Game Maker and Flash. I'm glad someone did a write up of this, I hardly saved anything from those days.
If you like the website you should try his game mentioned there, Hypnospace Outlaw. It's hours of reading stuff like that. And you can get all the Granny Cream's Hot Butter Ice Cream you want.
When I was a kid making games, I used ZZT. My brother recently got back into it and started teaching his kids for to make ZZT games. I found the programming language too constrictive. It didn't have great support for things like variables and loops. I still enjoyed it. My brother reasoned that the small instruction set makes it easy for his kids to learn to code in it. I suppose that's true. But he never learned to code in higher level languages, so he doesn't really know how frustrating it is to have to write so much ZZT code to accomplish something which would be so simple in another language.
My earliest "gnarly bug" experience was that the "set flag" operations in ZZT are limited to 8 flags, but it doesn't throw an error if you exceed that limit; it just wraps to the zeroth flag. It took me a full year to figure it out as a ten-year old.
> It took me a full year to figure it out as a two-year old.
o_O
Edit: i see you corrected it now, but with hn you never know..
Well, it was limited to 8 flags.
warms my heart to see this so high. that summer I was 10 and discovered ZZT and the surprirsingly robust editor and language was really where it all began for me tech-wise. and I was just thinking about it two days ago
I joke that I learned how to SmallTalk before I learned how to small-talk.
Man this is taking me back!
The online groups where we made games together, the tons of ideas and concept art sketches in school notebooks, ZZT as someone else mentioned, the PACKARD BELL...
It surfaced this in my memory too, havent thought about it in a few decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Hamster_Republic_Role...
related: https://harmonyzone.org/RMDictionary/RMDictionary.html
Speaking of old game frameworks, before developers used the Cocoa framework to create Mac apps, there was Apple's other Cocoa: https://www.engadget.com/2011-08-03-found-footage-apple-intr...
As a kid two years younger that also grew up in Florida, got obsessed with making games (though with the BYOND engine), created/deleted crappy but gradually less crappy games, eventually got into music and especially prog instead (pink floyd was my favorite band - dream theater was my first concert), had most likely undiagnosed ADHD (my assessment is actually tomorrow!), thought about going to Full Sail for either game dev or music production, this was a very fun read.
I started a bit earlier with QBasic. The coolest thing was using assembly to make code really fast. I understood exactly none of it, but thought that was the ultimate programming language and wanted to learn it one day.
Eventually I learned you don't really need it and felt a bit sad. Similar sadness I feel now that LLMs write all the code for you.
The website and the theme of the website are perfect for each other. Jay, if you are reading this, please don't change a thing.
Klik'n Play's spreadsheet programming worked surprisingly well with my young mind. Wasted so many hours making mini games in the 1990s.
The only thing I ever used to make games was OHRRPGE
It was hilarious. I didn't know what I was doing, but the dos aesthetics and the many options for FF style attacks made me really happy at the time.
There is an incredible OHRRPGE game called False Skies that ate 100+ hours of my life a couple years ago: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1830040/False_Skies/
It's probably my favorite JRPG... ever?
dang. kept expecting him to discover dungeons & dragons...
Rpgmaker days :)
Whoever maintains this blog website should definitely improve the site's nostalgia theme to make the content more readable.
It could represent how the web was in the 90s, but it doesn't represent what readers like these days. I sent this post to my friend and said to just open it in reader mode. Our eyes are not as sharp as in the 90s my friend.
i so disagree - and please don't generalize and talk about "what readers like these days" you != everyone
My favorite game-making experiences as a kid (early 90s) were:
- borrowing a BASIC game-making book from the library and hand-typing programs into QBASIC on my uncle's computer, trying to figure out how to translate the slightly-different BASIC dialect in the book on the fly
- making my own ZZT[0] games for an audience of one: myself. When I discovered the web later and learned that there was a huge community of ZZT makers out there, I was floored.
I have made several games as an adult, but none of those experiences has really been as much fun as those early ones.
[0] https://museumofzzt.com/
wow it remember me myspace . Nice web site and story !
Frames and patterned background... And to think this was once cutting edge <sigh>
On a phone, they make a really poor reading experience.
But it perfectly captures what the site is about. ;-)
Exactly! I read it on the phone and I enjoyed the nostalgic look of the page.
I was even thinking, this is what the web used to be.
If instead of this it was written on another Medium blog or as a bunch of tweets, it wouldn’t have had the same impact that it does for me. It is the way that it should be, for the story it is telling.