Made snake in high school. I remember figuring out the game had to run in a big loop and that feeling like a revelation from above.
fusslo 4 hours ago [-]
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
arjie 47 minutes ago [-]
It was Hammer. I made a map purporting to be school and the hostages were in the principal’s room. No intention to shoot real people or anything. Just play. Same map but with bomb there and in the library for no real reason. We had a “clan” and put our clan tag up when we played on LAN or at the gamer cafe but we only ever played with ourselves and a few others there so that wasn’t that useful (only dial-up everywhere).
Naming ourselves what we did would probably have us outcast today considering we did so because we liked to play on the Terrorist side. Fortunately, we moved on to AoS/DotA a few years after and all was well.
coldpie 3 hours ago [-]
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/
kccqzy 3 hours ago [-]
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. It only began to make sense in the later years of elementary school and in middle school.
alnwlsn 3 hours ago [-]
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.
tosapple 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
vegnus 3 hours ago [-]
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.
enugu 56 minutes ago [-]
Reminds me of making Chess in QBasic in school, without knowing what an array was. Was trying to encode board state in graphics (by putting some special pixels at corner of squares). Then got around talking to someone who had already made a chess game - he casually mentioned arrays. It was a revelation to me!
The cycle of just implementing something quickly and seeing the program work for the first time with wonder was something. In contrast to later on, where I delayed implementation and took hammock-oriented programming to an extreme. Curiously, AI is bringing back the 'just do it and iterate' phase with its pros and cons.
smolder 3 hours ago [-]
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.
mysterydip 2 hours ago [-]
I learned the value of naming variables and functions :D booya1 and booya2 don’t tell you much when looking at code a month later
1 hours ago [-]
atribecalledqst 2 hours ago [-]
The little glimpses into the forum culture (and just what it felt like to be a kid on the internet back then) really take me back.
I think I'm glad I didn't discover 4chan or SA back then - my sense of humor was pretty horrible and edgy by itself (in my head I call it "proto-4chan"). I don't think I needed to see anything that would encourage it. South Park and Maddox were probably my biggest influences back then.
arjie 42 minutes ago [-]
I went looking for old Linux forum posts where I used to call people “Microserfs” (there was some page that came up with this and I adopted it wholeheartedly) any time they dual-booted. Sucks for everyone else. On the Internet no one knows you’re a (12 year old) dork.
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.
debo_ 5 hours ago [-]
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.
dormento 4 hours ago [-]
> 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..
willismichael 3 hours ago [-]
Well, it was limited to 8 flags.
debo_ 37 minutes ago [-]
As a computing native, I mix up my 2s and 10s all the time /s
soupfordummies 4 hours ago [-]
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
debo_ 3 hours ago [-]
I joke that I learned how to SmallTalk before I learned how to small-talk.
jrootabega 5 hours ago [-]
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.
atribecalledqst 2 hours ago [-]
Hypnospace is a classic. I was sad that Dreamsettlers was canceled. Love puzzle-y games where the puzzles are seamlessly integrated into the worldbuilding (Chants of Sennaar is another good example of this, IMO)
The music in particular was so good - I was still listening to Klyfta and Barnaby's Chair long after I finished my second (third?) playthrough
jrootabega 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah it was. And I think it had full albums in it somewhere. The music in Dropsy was great too.
soupfordummies 4 hours ago [-]
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...
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.
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.
KingOfCoders 1 hours ago [-]
I remember making games as a kid in the 1980s. Sadly no distribution available back then to ordinary kids - except perhaps in the UK.
sandrae 5 hours ago [-]
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.
sendgeetikamail 2 hours ago [-]
unhinged shades of purples, greens, and blues. textured, marbles, checkered backgrounds. was this peak design? maybe not. but it was peak happiness.
Aeolun 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Klik'n Play's spreadsheet programming worked surprisingly well with my young mind. Wasted so many hours making mini games in the 1990s.
rootsudo 4 hours ago [-]
Rpgmaker days :)
mhink 36 minutes ago [-]
That's what first got me into programming! RPG Maker 2000 and its GameFAQs forum. I don't think I ever released anything good, but playing with it- and especially trying games other people made in it, and getting to see how they were implemented!- was huge for me.
I wonder how many people will actually remember this, but there was a game called Jay's Journey that was a surprisingly good send-up of both RPG Maker games and the kind of fantasy RPGs it was based on in general.
erdemo 6 hours ago [-]
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.
MacNCheese23 5 hours ago [-]
i so disagree - and please don't generalize and talk about "what readers like these days" you != everyone
debo_ 5 hours ago [-]
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.
dang. kept expecting him to discover dungeons & dragons...
FLeXMurphy 2 hours ago [-]
Klik/MMF/Games Factory were a godsend. Daily Click and other websites (Pixel-nation?), super active forums. Lots of personalities.
Nice to see the list of people included on here, including FAIND (Fallen Angel Industries). Furry, Factor X, Tango Strike, the list goes on. 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.
patrick_rtk 4 hours ago [-]
wow it remember me myspace . Nice web site and story !
glimshe 6 hours ago [-]
Frames and patterned background... And to think this was once cutting edge <sigh>
On a phone, they make a really poor reading experience.
maybewhenthesun 6 hours ago [-]
But it perfectly captures what the site is about. ;-)
QuantumNomad_ 6 hours ago [-]
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.
learntoplaypitc 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 17:29:45 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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
Naming ourselves what we did would probably have us outcast today considering we did so because we liked to play on the Terrorist side. Fortunately, we moved on to AoS/DotA a few years after and all was well.
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/
The cycle of just implementing something quickly and seeing the program work for the first time with wonder was something. In contrast to later on, where I delayed implementation and took hammock-oriented programming to an extreme. Curiously, AI is bringing back the 'just do it and iterate' phase with its pros and cons.
I think I'm glad I didn't discover 4chan or SA back then - my sense of humor was pretty horrible and edgy by itself (in my head I call it "proto-4chan"). I don't think I needed to see anything that would encourage it. South Park and Maddox were probably my biggest influences back then.
o_O
Edit: i see you corrected it now, but with hn you never know..
The music in particular was so good - I was still listening to Klyfta and Barnaby's Chair long after I finished my second (third?) playthrough
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...
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.
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.
It's probably my favorite JRPG... ever?
I wonder how many people will actually remember this, but there was a game called Jay's Journey that was a surprisingly good send-up of both RPG Maker games and the kind of fantasy RPGs it was based on in general.
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.
- 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/
Nice to see the list of people included on here, including FAIND (Fallen Angel Industries). Furry, Factor X, Tango Strike, the list goes on. 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.
On a phone, they make a really poor reading experience.
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.