So on another forum someone just posted he finished his roguelike random dungeon generator and it reminded me how I did that too way way back when I was on the pre-graphics, "ascii-only" stage of learning to code. It got me thinking how an ascii-baed random-dungeon generator is really "one of those things" every aspiring game programmer makes at some point, so I figured lets turn that idea into a thread! But lets skip the obvious / simple things like string sorting or pong.

Another one I thought of is a basic isometric, Final Fantasy Tactics-style "game" or prototype. I got all the rendering and map working, then lost interest right around when I got to the gameplay mechanics part (realized FFT-style games aren't really my genre).

Sudoku generator. A bit tricky when you don't know what an array is yet (that was me about nine years ago). Not generally for the end result, but for the logic involved. I still think of it as a nice introductory exercise. No internet access allowed, of course, that would be too easy.

asteroids, or some variation of moving an free-roaming object, and shooting other free-roaming objects.

was my first "real" game i made, and the shooting mechanic's were so incredibly broken(could only fire 1 shot at a time), but i was proud of it it none the less, 7 years have passed since then, but it was fun=-)

I only made one game. 4 on line (or 4 in a line, or 4 in 1 line, or *shoots himself* ). That one seems popular too since I've seen many sites with sources on it.

It was for a project of an OOP course. Made in Java with the MVC pattern and using Swing for the "view" (UI). Around 2k lines of code, which sounds a lot for what the game was actually doing.

It was partly because the adherence to the MVC pattern, the totally unnecessary getters/setters we were asked to add, my obtuseness dealing with the positions (lots of translations between Swing component coords, to x,y coords to matrix positions... and back) and of course my total lack of the sightless idea of what I was doing.

So lots and lots of boilerplate code! yay!

It was fun. I hope it's the first and last game I make with Swing though :D

Well, I missed the usual games I guess. I made breakout, tetris, snake and some other stuff AFTER about 5 years of programming just to try how much times do they take to code. No dungeon generation, no testx RPGs.

I guess minesweeper could be a game that everyone made at some point, I did make it in 2 versions (for DOS and for Windows). I guess a hexagonal minesweeper and a game prototype can be called isometric tilemap game.

A shoot'em-up. Not really surprising, given that the way they're designed make it very easy to get accustomed to handle objects in a game (you don't need to bother keeping track of which objects exist and which objects to run or not run for performance, you just create them as needed and then they're gone forever when they go off-screen) Also shoot'em-ups can get by with very simple physics (there isn't even a need for inertia or gravity). As a bonus, they make for a good recipe for procedural generation - just create enemies at random! =D

i assumed everyone made their first Text-Based Adventure or CYOA at some point to experiment with calling functions ....or maybe it was just me lol

Network Tetris for mIRC script.
mIRC script was vital to my learning process.


L. Spiro

my first game, i guess was an RPG written in TI-85 BASIC. I think the code ended up using almost all the available free programmable memory in my calculator and if you played it for too long it would run out of memory because i had no way to free it ;)

I started out on 8-bit machines. People tended to write things like text adventures, pacman, tetris.

That multiplayer tank game where you input angle/range data and try and hit other tanks. (It evolved into Worms eventually)

Everyone must have written Life, surely? I remember writing it in Postscript to run on the printer :-). One generation per page made it expensive to run, but 300dpi means a HUGE view...