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Being a kid making games in the early 2000s

Being a kid making games in the early 2000s

farmerbb

Comments (44)

  • fusslo
    I remember what a battle it was to 'figure it out' back thenIf 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 HDDThe 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
  • vegnus
    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.
  • atribecalledqst
    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.
  • waltbosz
    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.
  • jrootabega
    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.
  • soupfordummies
    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...
  • karmakurtisaani
    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.
  • rgovostes
    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...
  • KingOfCoders
    I remember making games as a kid in the 1980s. Sadly no distribution available back then to ordinary kids - except perhaps in the UK.
  • Guy-ute
    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.
  • sandrae
    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
    unhinged shades of purples, greens, and blues. textured, marbles, checkered backgrounds. was this peak design? maybe not. but it was peak happiness.
  • testaccount28
  • Aeolun
    The only thing I ever used to make games was OHRRPGEIt 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.
  • paulryanrogers
    Klik'n Play's spreadsheet programming worked surprisingly well with my young mind. Wasted so many hours making mini games in the 1990s.
  • rootsudo
    Rpgmaker days :)
  • erdemo
    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.
  • debo_
    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/
  • kirth_gersen
    dang. kept expecting him to discover dungeons & dragons...
  • FLeXMurphy
    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
    wow it remember me myspace . Nice web site and story !
  • glimshe
    Frames and patterned background... And to think this was once cutting edge <sigh>On a phone, they make a really poor reading experience.
  • learntoplaypitc
    [flagged]