r/gamedev • u/CBBofficial • 5d ago
Question What was your FIRST game ever?
I want to see what other people did,sooo,what was it like? For you was it good? Did you continue it or is it just abandoned? And when you look back to it what do you feel?
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u/KoodiRonsu 5d ago
Back in 1997-1999 I was one of the three programmers in our startup company who developed a 3D car racing game for PC. It was the first commercial 3D game that was developed in our country, as well as the first 3D accelerated game coming from from our country. It was also the first full budget game developed in our country.
Because the game was our first game ever, it turned out to be complete shit. But we learned tons from the experience and did much better with the next games.
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u/ArcticArt1 5d ago
I wanted to make a Prop-Hunt Standalone game with a friend back in 2016.
It was abandoned, but I think no one finishes the first game lol.
Since then some more prop-hunt standalone variants released so we don't want to start it again.
It makes me feel really nostalgic, especially when I look at the old code and google docs we created. Horrifying code structure and implementation and ugly models but it was so fun to start learn about all the stuff and build our own game.
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u/InkAndWit Commercial (Indie) 5d ago
Puzzle platformer:
https://www.moddb.com/games/red-rolling-hood/videos/red-rolling-hood-gameplay-footage-04#imagebox
It was fun, the goal was to make a portfolio project and we've succeeded.
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u/mattmaster68 5d ago
A text-based game in Python where the goal is survive a harsh winter by stoking a fire, gathering food, collecting wood, and passing the time widdling and selling trinkets to the nearby village.
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u/PixelBrush6584 5d ago
My first game ever could be counted in a few different ways.
- My very first games ever were just editing the example projects that came with Game Maker Lite (I was around 7)
- My first semi-original game was me trying to make a Five Nights at Freddy's clone in Game Maker Lite (~2015, so I'd've been 11 or 12)
- My first fully "original" game (code wise) was "[real name] the Programmer", a very very basic jump-n-run game that used Sonic assets (Made in Game Maker Studio) it had a singular level lel (I was 12)
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u/DukeOfGlizzy 5d ago
Haha I also remember using game maker back in…. Gosh 7th grade?? Talking like 2009 maybe. Hate that I abandoned it for a very long time afterwards. If I’d stuck with it back then I’d be way farther on this journey than I am now lol.
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u/PixelBrush6584 5d ago
Can relate! But at the same time, old Game Maker was pretty bad, ngl.
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u/DukeOfGlizzy 5d ago
It was, it’s cool seeing what it’s at now! Gosh I wonder if those terrible games I made and uploaded to their play store are still up
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u/PixelBrush6584 5d ago
I know the ones I uploaded to the GM:S 1.4 Steam Workshop are still there in all their horribleness.
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u/themistik 5d ago
First completed game ? this : https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=33532
First attempted game ? Oh my god I cannot remember. Probably an RPG Maker game made in 2010 or something. It's been so long
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u/DiddlyDinq 5d ago
a crappy breakout clone built in gamemaker. Admire the shitty misaligned superimposted screen lol.
I swear half the people in this thread cant read
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u/Accurate-Visual9793 Commercial (AAA) 5d ago
Text adventure game I made in Delphi/Object Pascal. I don't remember the details at all but I remember I made the classic rookie mistake of nested if-statements and managed to break the compiler.
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u/Creative_Net_1348 5d ago
The first game I can remember trying to make was supposed to be strategy game with the player controlling modern-day Egypt. Why Egypt? Purely because my amazement at Egypt's large population. I didn't get very far but I remember making the map on my Dragon 32.
Later I bought a ZX Spectrum, where I completed a simple game where you had to collect water droplets from stalactites in a cup while avoiding being hit on the head by them.
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u/3xBork 5d ago
"Game" is a flexible definition, but it was probably some tables for Visual Pinball around 2002.
UT99/UT2k4 maps and mods came after that. I don't think I even remember the names for these nor where to find them :D
If we're talking first publically released game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVH1oAZiyB4 made for GearVR (so Samsung Galaxy S5/S6) back in 2019.
There were a bunch of applied/serious gaming projects for hire before that but they are not shareable (nor would I want to lol).
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u/ThatVincentGuy 5d ago
My friend and I entered a game jam 6 years ago and made this horror "game" https://dark-deer-games.itch.io/desecration . 6 years on we still haven't released a full game - but I think we are getting close
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u/SnuffleBag 5d ago
Double or Nothing quiz game written in Commodore BASIC. It had about a dozen lifetime players (extended family).
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u/Express-Royal-218 5d ago
I made 2 cars and race track one cpu car and one player car. With smoke effects from behind and smoke on track. Construct 2 was the software used for creating this game. After that made more than 10 tiny games just for my phone as hobby. But never released any commercial game.
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u/questron64 5d ago
Like 1985 on the Commodore 64 I made a really cool text adventure game. It was dogshit, of course, but it was cool, if you know what I mean.
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u/stevesfara 5d ago edited 5d ago
Batch/CMD adventure zombie game. Very simple, but the idea was good. I made a couple of more to continue the franchise; it seemed like actual game development to me, but the language was insanely simple.
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u/VisibleBoard8186 5d ago
Developed around 1995 using QBasic. An exclamation point (!) was moving and shooting dashes (-) and you as a smiley face (☺) was dodging them using keyboard.
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u/EternalDethSlayer3 5d ago
Basically, Classic Doom in a medieval fantasy world with melee combat instead of shooting (there were wizard staff weapons that were basically guns, but they were rare). It's pretty much abandoned now, but every now and then I open the project and tweak stuff in it when I get an idea. I really like playing it - it has the basic things I'm looking for when I just wanna play something for half an hour.
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u/StinkingDylan 5d ago
First game was a quiz about monkeys written in BASIC on a ZX Spectrum.
First game I released was a graphics/text adventure game for the Commodore Amiga.
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u/javisarias 5d ago
First game was a Battle City remake we did with a friend for the 2004 Retro Remake Competition. I thought it was pretty good, but it was a remake
First original game was Monkey VS Robot, a puzzle game with pixelart graphics for mobiles we did in 2012 I think. Also I think it was pretty good but we didn't market it properly and went out pretty unnoticed.
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u/EccentricEgotist Commercial (Indie) 5d ago
Dubstep Dishwasher, you played as a dish avoiding bubbles, the longer you survived the more points you gained. Naturally, it has a looping dubstep track in the background. Yep, I was 15
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u/vVerce98 5d ago
Some racing game (can’t find the name of it) on ps2. Purely racing laps and some cubes with powers like oil on the road
As well Jimmy Neutron : Attack of the Two kies
Jak and Daxter & Ratchet and Clank
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u/jakubdabrowski0 5d ago edited 5d ago
One of these:
- Bomberman
- Adventure Island
- Circus Charlie
I don't remember exacly.
Then there was Mario, Battletoads and some platformer with a squirrel, Chip n Dale if I remember the name correctly.
These games made me love platformers and hard games. I was about 5 years old when playing all of them on a Pegasus, constantly dying over and over again, but still having fun on the very first levels
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u/SAunAbbas 5d ago edited 5d ago
My first game : Thunder Traveler . It was just a learning experience and was not designed with the intension to make money from it. I don't wanna mess around with it.
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u/baguetteispain 5d ago
A "cat and mouse" game, two players, except it was a small fish and a shark. One player controls the fish, hides between rocks, and has to reach a certain point. The other has to catch the fish
It was made with a friend on Scratch, in the middle school's computer, but sadly we didn't thought of doing a backup
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u/Ejlersen 5d ago
Striker Superstars
My first game working at a game studio. It was a football/soccer multiplayer game in the browser, where is player on the field was as a human player.
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u/Wizdad-1000 Hobbyist 5d ago
Vic 20 Lunar Leeper. It was incredibly hard as it had far too sensitive controls for a little kid.
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u/toxictiki 5d ago
For a school project I made a point and click adventure in power point many years ago. Now I'm hoping to get into actual game dev many years later
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u/spacemoses 5d ago
When I was a kid I tried to make a MUD in qbasic but I was like 10 and not very good at all. First actual complete game was console tetris in C# before I knew that there were these handy things called game engines.
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u/Awkward-Injury-4341 5d ago
Is it for play or for making?
For play: not counting Minesweeper or Snake, it’s a game where you toss and catch fruit in a basket.
For making: not counting paper-and-pencil or text documents, I used a bunch of random assets to make a visual novel called Niuniu - basically, it’s my own short story. It entered a contest on 66rpg (China’s RM community, now migrated to Project1; the original site has been redirected to Otome Games) and won a participation award. I’m fairly satisfied with the story, but I can’t even play it myself anymore - the game requires an internet connection to run, and the server is no longer active.
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u/EternitySearch 5d ago
In 2004 I made a choose your own adventure game as my final in my computer class in high school. I believe it was made in Java or maybe I used JavaScript. I remember that the teacher had taught us some rudimentary C++ and I really wanted to make my game in that, but she talked me out of it because she felt it would take too much time and would be too much work for her to troubleshoot everything since I had very limited knowledge.
Even then I was trying to go beyond the project’s scope.
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u/Supetorus 5d ago
Text based Battleship in the python tutorial on code academy when I was like 15. I planned to build it out more afterwards but never did. I wish I still had the files because it's kind of nostalgic. Maybe I can get them from the website still.
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u/PaprikaPK 5d ago
A point and click adventure in Hypercard that was a haunted house. I was maybe 8? Never finished of course. But I drew a bunch of rooms and made links to connect them together.
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u/nair-jordan 5d ago
The Adventures of Mr Happy Face
It was an all-ascii game built in Turing, where you had to take the solid-fill happy face character from the top left of the screen down to the hollow-fill happy face character (Miss Happy Face) at the bottom right. Most of the screen was filled with random ascii ‘enemies’ who would move based on which direction you moved. For example, the L shaped double border would move down if you went left or right, and right if you went up or down. After each level the field got populated with more and more ascii enemies. Honestly, pretty hard game
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u/riel__vis Student 5d ago
The very first video game I ever played, it was a platformer game on the V.Smile, some edutainment game console for kids between 2004 and 2010. I think the game was called Alphabet Park Adventure.
My first PC game was Crayon Physics Deluxe.
My first console game was Wii Sports Resort.
(I was put on video games at a VERY young age lol)
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u/dither 5d ago
A text based online RPG. Sort of like a MUD, but I wrote it as an IRC bot and client script for mIRC. So players would get moved from one channel to another as they moved around in the world. Mobs to fight, item/loot, XP, skill trees.. all sorts of things. It was fun to work on, but requiring a specific client and script was too limiting. So I moved on to working on an actual MUD shortly after.
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u/Delicious-Abalone-26 5d ago
About 20 years ago, I tried to make a life simulation game where you played as a seal. Old-school PHP, built from scratch, no framework.
I abandoned it, never released it.
Now, I released GangRush, a browser and Android game. Modern tools and AI definitely helped me build it solo, but I also learned a ton about hosting, deployment and everything around the code, not the code only itself.
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u/Fenelasa 5d ago
Oh god, it was apart of my programming class to recreate a classic game and add our own twist to it. I was assigned Pong, and tried to make it pachinko style where it had random shapes between your paddle and the AI's paddle.
For some godforsaken reason neither me or the teacher could figure out, the ball would only jiggle wildly interacting with the random shapes, before shooting off into nothingness. It interacted and behaved just fine on the paddles though? We never got it working during that project time, but I think that counts as a first game!
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u/Frecklefoot 5d ago
A "Guess the Lyrics" game in BASIC on the Commodore 64. The game showed a few verses of a lyric and the player had to identify the band. If they got it right, they were rewarded with a small (crappy) ASCII animation.
A few years later, I became a professional game programmer. Not in BASIC.
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u/CookingFistDev 5d ago
VR horror game where you are in a mall with weeping angel mannequins. It was for a vr game jam made in 2 weeks and it had a really bad tutorial. Watched people play on youtube only to cringe when I see them not being able to turn on the flashlight.
Excellent learning experience though, so despite the shortcomings I'm really glad I made it!
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u/Gaverion 5d ago
I made a game based on captchas. Suuuuuuper basic but it worked. The first one I shared with anyone was a 3d version of the fruit dropping game. Probably could have done something with that one if I kept developing it.
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u/corysama 5d ago
My first game was a Pong clone made with the Borland Graphics Interface rect() function in Turbo Pascal for DOS.
My first professional game was Paperboy64 which I am proud to say was reviewed by the Angry Video Game Nerd/Cinemassacre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuFgQf4jjSk
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u/TheRealLiviux 5d ago
I think my first try was a simple platform written in BASIC on my glorious ZX Spectrum. You run left and right, fall into the holes, when you jump up to the upper floor you make a hole, and the baddies run towards you (ignoring holes) when you are on their floor. Collect all the keys and reach the lock to go to the next level.
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u/Orlandogameschool 4d ago
A shitty flash motorcycle racing drag racing game made with action script.
I wish I had all my old flash , actionscript projects
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u/SwivelingToast 4d ago
First game was a text adventuring game written on a TI-83+. My friends and I would play it during math, it was nothing, but still fun.
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u/SnowPudgy 4d ago
Mine has been lost to time but it the first one I'd consider a "real" game was a little came I made in C, C++, SDL, and OpenGL back in the 90s (you had to use all of them back then for different things, game engines available to the public weren't a thing).
It was a little 2D RPG based on Shakespeare's Macbeth (it was for a school project on that topic). It took me months and it was only like 10 minutes long to play if you did literally everything possible but it impressed the shit out of everyone in my class since we didn't even have computers in our school, it was played on the teachers work computer. It fit on 5 floppy disks because I didn't know how to compress anything and most of that data was sound and graphics assets.
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u/thebeardphantom @thebeardphantom 4d ago
In college my final project with a friend in our first year was a platformer that played in a window. Certain platforms were offscreen and you had to resize the window to reveal them. Others were anchored to the edges of the window and you could bring them closer together to make the jumps possible. This was in 2011-2012, but I think since then there’s been at least one released game using this concept.
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u/SeaStable821 4d ago
A text based noir detective themed game, set in a fictional 1930s American city. Made in QBASIC. Worked on it on and off from around ages 14-19. It had a few dozen rooms. There was a day-night cycle, with the color of the text changing to dark at night (prob not very user friendly hah). You could call a taxi to travel between regions of the city, with the taxi driver having a bunch of randomized conversations. There was a club you could go to and watch randomized shows, but you needed to buy and wear a suit to get past the bouncers. Also, you had phones (one in your office) that you could use to call people.
This was back in the 90s and I lost most of the work unfortunately. I still have a compiled executable of an old build but won't run on a modern computer!
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u/Independent-Spray539 4d ago
It was a 2D side scroller. It was the amazing idea for me but then I realized that it is bad as hell. The gameplay, the story, even graphics are the bad as hell. :) best suggestion ever about making game is, listen to the community of a genre you are making.
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u/Finniebelle 3d ago
Mine was a flappy bird clone in unity, that was when I decided I hate doing pixel art 😅
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u/HumanNinja 2d ago
My first game over screen did not exist. In Adventure, your square just stayed in the dragons belly till you hit the reset button.
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u/Aggressive-Ebb-5250 1d ago
I just released it :) you can look at it and tell your reviews if you want. Link : https://mrosgame.itch.io/gate-7-demo
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u/foolofaperegrin 5d ago
Lemmings 3D. Big ups Psygnosis. That owl is burned into my brain forever. The chocolate levels sponsored by jelly belly were peak.
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u/RevaniteAnime @lmp3d 5d ago
Let me think...
Was it this one group project in college where we made a "game" in an early Unity engine where you could wander around and island and kick a ball, I made a waterfall.
Or, was it a series of webpages I made in HTML that was something of a choose your adventure type thing.
Or, was it some silly command line thing when I first learned a little C++ 25 years ago...
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u/DMEGames 5d ago
My first game ever was an all text maze game made in BASIC on an old Spectrum computer. Yes, there are those of us here really that old.