I am quite interested in hearing your stories about your first few games ( or attempts at games ) you have created, and how has your coding and game style evolved over the years ?

For me, my first game was coded in QBasic back in the early 90's ( 9th grade ). It was a basic music game with nothing much to is. The computer played a note, you had to guess what it was.

Later on I some how managed to make a (crappy) multi player text game using the system Net Send .

From there I never did much game wise, until I started coding in LSL . I created, and sold several casino games with realistic "Las Vegas" play style and odds. ( Made over $60 from sales before Linden Labs banned gambling. HERE are some of the source codes).

Since that time, the only game I have released to the public, was a plug in for Bukkit that added slot machines .

As far as my coding evolution, I have always been highly experimentative - being mostly "let's see if I can do this". I start personal projects all the time to see if I can create a specific part of a program, with out actually creating a "finished product" .

I do complete personal projects from time to time, however they are usually just plugins or modifications for existing programs.

Visual basic. First semester final project: shoot bouncing balls. Second semester final project: winsock/multiplayer tank game.

Java. First semester final project: Missile Command, ended up making it multithreaded without knowing that I did... Solved a bug by adding extra explosions outside of the play area and other such magic. Second semester: IRC chat client

I started with some variant of basic under DOS in 93 but I didn't write my first "game" until I got my hands on Visual Basic 3 (I think it was 3, maybe it was 5, not sure). It was a five minute adventure game, you had to first click around a map of the Caribbean (shamelessly pulled from an Encyclopedia I had - didn't know about copyrights back when I was 11 years old) to move your ship, then you had to click around the island (VB labels) to get to the digging spot to find treasure. There was also some part where a bunch of text scrolled in some box which was meant to simulate travel time. Fond memories :)

I've done a few games since then, mostly in Java, including team projects for university courses. I'd like to think that my coding style has evolved a bit but none of the games are particularly worth mentioning. I made a pac-man clone to prove to myself that I could finish a game, but ironically I did not finish it as it's missing sound. I did finish other projects though, including some non-game opensource software, so not all hope is lost ^_^;;;

I kind of gave up on my space game due to work eating my time and having had some hope in the Infinity game where Flavien was doing the same things as I did but a hundred times better (Infinity is pretty much dead now but a whole bunch of other cool space games have sprung up in recent years to take on the mantle). When I stopped working on it I had a to-scale solar system where you could fly around in your ship (this took some creative solutions to the problems of coordinate systems and z-buffer precision, fortunately there were other people here at GameDev.net who worked through the same problems). Still love 3D rendering though and still waiting for a worthy successor to the Battlecruiser series, so the dream lives on, maybe I'll start again.

I've never actually coded a finished game before, but I have recoded the game that I am working on 3 times. It is the first game I've ever programmed, using LUA. Every time I recode the game it ends up being half the lines of code. I have learned so much that looking at what I did in the past makes me ashamed.

Even though I am a beginner I feel I have come up with some creative solutions to implement game systems. For example, I created a system to use touch gestures for RPG inputs (aka battle commands).

The whole experience has been so rewarding, and I will continue programming even though I have a full time job as a Structural Engineer.

The first game I ever built was brutal. It was a Super Mario "clone" (if you can call it that). I didn't have a proper game loop, so my code got longer and longer as I added more sequential parts. It was done in Pascal.

My next game was done in a language (or toolkit would probably be a better term) called RealBasic. It was a graphical programming language that handled the update loop for you and you could add bitmaps to a scene, then double click on them to add different pieces of code that would be executed on button down, or on update, or on mouse click, etc. It was actually really cool. The game was a mario party knock-off (hmmm, I'm sensing a theme here). It supported 4 players locally and had 3 mini games. A "dodge-shell" game where a turtle shell would bounce around increasing in speed each time it hit a wall. The last person standing would win. There was a Mario Kart knockoff where you could change lanes and obstacles you needed to avoid would come at you randomly faster and faster. The last player to get hit would win. The last game was a Smash Brothers game (this was a 2 player only game), it was probably the least fun of all of them but Mario could fight Donkey Kong and each had several attacks. The coding in this game was pretty good and way better than my first game, but a lot of that was because the framework forced you to organize your code in a reasonable way.

After that game I actually hadn't completed a full game until I got a job as a game programmer, although I had built lots of parts of games, such as an FPS with breakable glass, audio, particle effects and a simple physics engine. I also built a 3D level editor (this was done as my final project in university for my CS degree, and it actually was completed).

The games I make nowadays are much more... professional shall we say?

My first "finished" game was a 2D non scrolling shooter. (1 screen per level) where you used what was supposed to be a WW1 aircraft to shoot down other WW1 aircrafts.

The aircrafts were 2 rectangles, one big and a smaller one on top, + a line in front for the propeller, there was a green rectangle for the ground and a light blue background with a yellow circle in a corner (the sky and the sun), i made it in Pascal when i was 11, the levels were hardcoded, 3 levels(each with its own block of game logic, rendering code, etc), 1 enemy on lvl 1, 2 on lvl 2 and 3 on lvl 3), there were no functions (just labels and goto), all variables were global, the "AI" just had the enemies move from left to right and try to match your altitude. i even printed "nice looking" labels for the floppies so i could give copies of the game to friends. (This was before this thing called the internet became popular)

After that i read denthors VGA tutorials, learned some x86 assembly (i got a copy of those on a floppy somewhere still) and made a really awesome snake clone with a proper game loop, highscores, and some pretty nifty palette effects.

My first actual game, with main menu, graphics, sound effects, and complete, was a Monopoly in VB.

I have to say that the code was spectacularly awesome. Rather than using a struct or class, it had tons of arrays for each property.

The games:

very likely your avatar- Fox.(far better than Prehistoric 2)

then- first 3d game impressing infant like me

"Chasm - The Rift"

TES3- Morrowind, Gothic 2, Blade of Darkness (older I was to handle those)

Blood Rayne was intresting sequel from Ritual Entertainment, got destroyed, by 2 and movie ( Blood Rayne killing vampires?)

I was hating adventures, though my older cousin brought me shit like Monkie Island 1/2 (could not speak english yet)

Quake? (only my rich friend could play them, I was playing them without filtering, not much fun though)

BUT. Doom 3 was some nice stuff though.... (do not compare to Dead Space that my 12 year old cousin girl is breaking :)

Games are nice.... damn nice thing

First "game" was some sort of choose-your-own adventure/dungeon bash of some sort in C64 BASIC - the details are pretty fuzzy at this point :) Most of my memories of the C64 were of making music (it had an awesome, for the time, synthesizer) and trying to learn assembly.

When I started messing around with something called "AMOS" on Amiga, I created some rudimentary tile based dungeon crawls - I would kill to get my hands on that source code now, but alas, all gone and forgotten. I do remember, however, that was when I "discovered" how to optimize a scrolling tile map - at that time, it was too slow to just re-draw the tiles every frame, I had to hardware copy (blit) parts of the map and draw only the new tiles along the edges. I remember being pretty proud of that discovery.

I remember Štoky shiting himself up from Doom 3 (nightmares) , and he was a tough boy beating us all up! Tell it to my 12 y old cousin Tamara that is finishing Dead Space.... mad girl my cousin Tamarka :)