alt Hacker NewsBeing a kid making games in the early 2000s
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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...
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
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.
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.
Klik'n Play's spreadsheet programming worked surprisingly well with my young mind. Wasted so many hours making mini games in the 1990s.
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.
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.
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.
Rpgmaker days :)
wow it remember me myspace . Nice web site and story !
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.
Frames and patterned background... And to think this was once cutting edge <sigh>
On a phone, they make a really poor reading experience.
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...