How did you feel when first starting game development?

[EpicEbilninja]

Just a simple question to ask some people in this comminity: What was your experience like when you first started developing/moding games?

[xdaniel]

(EDIT: wow, didn't notice how long this became...)

 

It was difficult, as both my knowledge about things like the hexadecimal system, and the tools weren't quite there yet. I'm thinking of Pokemon Red and Blue here, which was probably my first foray into ROM hacking... It was during the early days of those games' hacking movements - back when Pokemap by PR was pretty much all there was, in terms of tools if I remember correctly. I did eventually learn more about hexadecimal and the Game Boy, at least enough to make codes that modified your inventory in RBY, as opposed to the codes that allowed you to change what was sold in shops - I was on holiday and didn't have access to the internet, yet wanted Master Balls or somesuch, so I just got the old Action Replay out and got to work, with not-equal searches, comparing results, changing memory...

 

Then with Pokemon GSC, I started learning more about bit operations, GB graphics, and more game-specific things like how warps and events worked, or how the map headers were laid out. It was a slow process, but there was a sprawling community - everyone was still learning, and everyone was willing to help you if you had a problem or question. Well, that was the specific community I was part of (good old FWB ~10 years ago, rest in peace), I don't know how it was internationally.

 

Around that time, meaning roughly 10-12 years ago, I got into Zelda OoT - playing it emulated in UltraHLE, stuttering along on my old PC with its Voodoo Banshee - which in turn got me interested in this weird code called "Beta Quest" that scrambled the game and the exits and stuff. I didn't do much with it back then, tho, I didn't even play it much because of how slow it was on my PC. Over time, I got a real cartridge of the game, the PAL v1.0 I have to this day, I found ZSO and once the Zelda Coalition forums started became a member of those, I got a GameShark-ish device called the Xploder 64 which I also still have, etc. And especially once the MQ Debug ROM hit us... it was like Pokemon RBY/GSC all over again, starting from scratch, working together to figure things out, helping each other (with some added drama, tho, but let's not get into that) and so on. Yet again I learned a bunch of stuff, about the game and the N64, as well working more on the feeble C knowledge I acquired around the time...

 

But before I delve even deeper into the past, let's tl;dr: I guess overall, when first starting to hack a specific game or trying to code a specific project, there's always a lot of excitement, especially when you're working on something that either no one or not many people have worked on before. You're bound to learn something, and there's usually at least one or two tidbits you'll be able to apply to other situations, too. It's even better if there's a group of like-minded people you can share your experience with, which I was lucky enough to have found with both of the "firsts" above (the FWB and ZSO/ZC).

 

Hope that makes some sense and didn't drift too much into boring stories of old

Edited November 25, 2012 by xdaniel

[EpicEbilninja]

For me, I started with gamemaker when I was only 9 years old...

 

When I started gamemaker, I knew absolutely nothing, but I thought I would be able to make a great game right at the moment I began. Well, that was a total flop, because I couldn't even process the basic functions back then. I was clueless and completly devestated in thinking I could make an awesome paper mario game with no experience at all! I didn't know what anything in the program menat... I thought the "jump to position(moves the object to a specific x,y)" literally made the player jump into the air, I had the gravity accidentally set so mario would float upwards, I eventually gave up trying to make mario jump, and made a sprite to look like he. did instead. I knew nothing about turnbased rpgs, and decided to make it a battle game instead... horrible...

 

eventually, I learned the very basics... I learned about the existance of variable a lot , looked at some tutorials, looked at the files of other people's games, studied the program language, and learned quite a bit on my own from there.

 

 

Now I am back to learning how to make a ds game using devkitpro/programmer's notepad(thanks again for showing me that xdan), and I am back to square one once again(well, not quite because GML did teach me a few things), and I am looking forward to creating great things someday!