Hi all,

I resent making anew topic for this, but I felt like I should introduce myself to whoever is interested.

I'm a 21 year old guy living in Switzerland with an interest in game development.

I studied game design in Belgium for a little over a year but roved to be a horrible student, I was however, and always have been, rather good at programming.

(Warning, in this next paragraph, I ramble about something that is nostalgic to me. By all means, skip it.)

I made my first game on a TI-84 calculator. It was a very short text RPG about a guy who deals drugs and beats up old ladies to buy vodka and ultimately go to russia by boat. I made a follow-up game set in russia with a friend, where you could actually walk around on the screen as a letter x and where you had to start a gang and challenge other russian gangs to take control of the area and return to your home with a boat full of vodka. You could also take your gang members to hookers, buy weapons, manage your weed plantage and get a girlfriend (if you got plastic surgery first). We were working on a grand 3rd installment with real quest lines and a reputation system when we bumped upon the limitations of our platform and had to give up on our game.

I'd like to really get into programming again and get to the level where I feel confident calling myself a programmer. At the moment, I'm more of an ideas guy with some limited knowledge onn every aspect involved in game design, but far from an expert on any of those.

I hope this forum will help stimulate me to work on my skills and maybe even get me into the gaming business, be it as a hobbyist or as a coding monkey for some company.

Ps. I'd like to plug my thread on the game design forum, where I ask some feedback on a semi-feasible project I'd like to work on.

Feedback is always welcome, both on that thread as well as on my posting style in general. (I suppose that would go in this thread.)

I've always been curious how difficult was it to program something for the TI-84 ?

It was a mess really.

I didn't use the machine code of the calculator, which is used for most games on ti calculators (because I didn't know how).

In stead I used the build in programming language, which is made to make little programs that solve math problems for you.

There are no methods or functions, you navigate the program with things called goto and labels.

If you write goto A it searches your program for a line saying lbl A and starts continues reading from there.

There are built in commands for making menus and outputting text at a given coordinate (which we used to make our screens)

Before I started on the second game I mentioned, me and my friend discovered that you can execute programs from within a program.

We used those to split up our code a bit but it really wasn't al that helpful since you couldn't use arguments.

Did I mention I learned the programming language by looking at a snake game I had on there and trial and error?