I spent a lot of time in my youth doing amateur game development.

My main languages were BASIC, Pascal (Turbo Pascal) and C. I also used some assembler for core graphics routines.

Mostly I created game engines or game prototypes. But I did work through a couple games into more complete states.

One was a game I called "Life". The core gameplay loop was to earn money which you then spent on in-game items or recreation. You had a happiness meter that you had to try to increase. Working in the game reduced it, while buying things and recreation increased it.

I made that game in the early 90s written in BASIC and using primitive ANSI graphics. It was basically a crude version of The Sims, which I created about a decade before the real Sims came out.

I also created a text-based hockey league management game written using Turbo Pascal. You could draft and trade players, simulate games during the season, and generally tried to build a winning team. This game worked quite well and I remember being somewhat popular among my friends.

A lot of other game prototypes I built included various RPG engines (never made a full RPG though), an attempt a real-time tactical strategy game based on Aliens, and various top-down shooter games.

More recently I experimented with the Godot engine and built a basic Frogger clone with SNES-era inspired graphics.

Just for my own entertainment. I wrote a dice poker game in the early 90s which I still play nearly every day. (I used to play vs. guys at school/college and originally wrote it so I could practice on my own.)

ETA: I remember the very first 'arcade' type game I made was a Robots clone. The funny thing was, I didn't know it was a Robots clone. I had never played Robots. It's just that the simplest possible action game it's possible to make will always be some variant of Robots.

Everything I did back then was using Turbo C. I briefly learned Pascal but soon switched to C, and later C++.

ETA2: add pic

(this was before I knew about getopt)

I made one game in my life, for my high school programming class, a buddy and I made a simple poker game in Pascal.

Sadly, my programming skills never progressed past that stage, I was more of a hardware guy.

In recent years, I have started to learn the basics of the C++ variant for Arduino, but even then my knowledge is very limited and I often need help when I try and write my own code.

I have considered picking up a game creation suite like Pixel Game Maker just to mess around with since it requires little to no coding and can do simple 2D games since that's all I'm really interested in. I just can't seem to find the time to take on yet another hobby or project. 😀

I made a "Battleships" game in Turbo Pascal. As fun as a Battleships against a computer could be.

It featured a very unbalanced AI... it had no strategy to find ships, but once it made a hit your ship was doomed. Both behaviours were intended (the second one to make the game difficult, the first one to ease the difficulty).

I once wrote a 'Battlezone' type 3D tank game where the AI used 2nd order calculus to lead shots, i.e. you would be hit when accelerating as well as when traveling at constant speed. It was unplayably hard. It was actually more fun to watch two AI armies fight each other, each with a different strategy (e.g. army A would charge directly at the enemy, while army B would try to circle around their targets.) There would be up to 100 tanks in these virtual battles.

Unfortunately, as with a lot of my early programs, this code is now lost. So much of the stuff I did back in the 90s is gone, it makes me sad.

ETA: This is funny - although the code is long gone, I still have the pen-and-paper notes I made for this project. I'm going to scan them when I find the time.

A few little ones but the most ambitious one I made was in my early teenage years. It was called "Cool Dude" and took up most of a 360kB floppy disk. From memory about half of it was sound samples (recorded through a home-made PCB) and half was code and data for the 34 levels (compressed and encrypted to foil casual cheaters). I originally wrote it on the Amstrad PC1512 but it used 80x25 text mode so ought to run on any PC with CGA/EGA/VGA or later graphics standards. It had a final boss which was basically a completely different minigame. It also had an editor which enabled skipping levels that you'd completed if you wanted. After we upgraded the family PC to a 486 I added character set redefinition for VGA machines. A friend of mine created some bonus levels with this which were much harder (too hard to for me, so it felt unfair to include them in the game). I also added a number of additional objects, but I don't remember if any of the levels actually used them. I had even more ambitious plans for a sequel, but they were a bit foiled by hardware scrolling being so coarse-grained in CGA/PC1512 graphics modes. It was written in C. It (and other stuff I wrote back then) is still online at https://www.reenigne.org/blog/software-downloads/ .

oldhighgerman wrote on 2024-07-26, 16:26:

Large (not lilely) or small. […]
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Large (not lilely) or small.

What was it's fumction (I don't mean having fun)?

What laguage/s did you use (and most importantly why that/those)?

Did you love it? Would you do it again? Did you do it again?

Going way-back... I published a number of small games as example programs for my C compiler.
Most of them were written by yours truly, but there were a couple that others gave me to put in.

Judging by what notices I could see in them, most of there were written around 2003.
I published the first edition of Micro-C in 1988 ... so some of them may have been in
the works before that.

BLKJACK - Blackjack (21) game
CASTLE - Large "adventure" game
CATMOUSE - Cat & Mouse in a maze
CHOPPERS - Animated helicopters
HANOI - Visual "towers of hanoi"
INVADER - Space invaders!
MCMAN - Tiny "pacman" like game
MEMORY - Two player memory game
MMIND - Digit guessing game
MSWEEP - MineSweeper
PONG - Two player Ping-Pong
PONG1 - Improved "" "" ""
SETS - Find sets in a card deck
SIMON - Play "Simon-Says" game
SNAKE - Classic snake game
SOLITAIR - Solitaire
TTT3D - 3 dimensional tic-tac-toe

If anyone actually want to see any of this stuff - I have posted these as part of my
"Release 40+ years worth of source code"
project - also on my site.

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

Dave Dunfield on Vogons!

Shocking!

Hi Dave. No you won't remember me. I'm no one. Carry on 😀

🤣 🤣 good thing I proof read my post. I mispelled Dave's last name. In an exceptionally bad way too!

oldhighgerman wrote on 2024-07-28, 22:21:

Dave Dunfield on Vogons! […]
Show full quote

Dave Dunfield on Vogons!

Shocking!

Hi Dave. No you won't remember me. I'm no one. Carry on 😀

🤣 🤣 good thing I proof read my post. I mispelled Dave's last name. In an exceptionally bad way too!

You never know - I might - send me a PM and let me know who you are...
(although I will say that after my incident in 2019 - there does seem to be plenty I don't remember)

and Yeah, over the years I've gotten every spelling you might imagine - and yes, some were "in a very bad way"

Dave

for DOS, a few some time back - mostly just to get something working and then left unpolished in terms of graphics and media. variations on pong, breakout, a top down racer and some text mode.

the tools were turbo pascal, quick basic, turbo c - i liked to vary things and try one project in more than one toolset

it was great fun at the time, i learned and followed tutorials on the early internet when vga programming and sharing clever assembly libraries was cool. those scenes all faded pretty much by 2000

later i did some in windows too - adding space invaders and frogger 'clones', everything was really just to try and build the engine and mechanics. i thought about releasing them but that would mean working out the gameplay and media to make them acceptable, i appreciated all who made those efforts to get games from working to being presentable and actually fun. later tools included VB, Delphi and a couple of bespoke tools from the early 2000's like blitz basic.

everything quickly dropped in favor of html5 and then more so for unity and so on a few years after that

you can download the DOS version of the last one I made -> https://bloodycactus.itch.io/underdark

there direct link; dos version does not play as well as the linux/windows ports.

https://github.com/stu/UnderDark/releases/dow … v0.2/ud_dos.zip

reenigne wrote on 2024-07-28, 20:41:

I originally wrote it on the Amstrad PC1512 but it used 80x25 text mode so ought to run on any PC with CGA/EGA/VGA or later graphics standards.

I tried this in Hercules mode and it doesn't work haha. I also had an Amstrad PC and my earliest programs were for it, and I didn't add Hercules support because I didn't know such a thing existed. I've actually been going back to my old programs and adding Hercules support to them. This is with Turbo C.

Do you remember a game called Jason Jupiter by Neil Drage?

Errius wrote on 2024-07-31, 15:48:

I tried this in Hercules mode and it doesn't work haha.

I'm not surprised! I think I was vaguely aware of Hercules/MDA (I seem to remember implementing support for them in an earlier piece of software) but I didn't try to support it for this - partly because I had no way to test it and partly because the game's use of colour (in particular different coloured keys open corresponding coloured locks) wouldn't have worked properly. (It didn't occur to me that some people are colour-blind!)

Errius wrote on 2024-07-31, 15:48:

Do you remember a game called Jason Jupiter by Neil Drage?

No, I never saw that one. There were two games in particular that I credit as inspiration for Cool Dude: "Willy the Worm" and "The Game with No Name".