Games you designed as a kid?

[LilGames]

How many of you have game design concepts that you came up with as a kid or teen... and then years later:

Did you ever develope any of those ideas into a complete game?
Would you, or do you look back and laugh?

I used to come up with rather derivative concepts. One was a mash-up of Moon Patrol + Lunar Lander. Another was simply an overhead boxing game. I think today maybe I should just make a few of those ideas reality as simple hokey Flash games.

[Ricardo C]

I came up with a few games in the early 80s. I must have been seven or eight. Very simplistic stuff, but I still think they could have been fun at the time. The one I remember best is "Supermarket", a single-screen game where you race up and down the aisles trying to fill a shopping list while dodging obstacles (spills, other shoppers, etc.) It was probably inspired by Activision's Frostbite.


Maybe I should try to make it now, who knows? Could be a passable casual game.

[Agent 4125]

When I was in 8th grade, I used Garry Kitchen's GameMaker to start a game called "The Galactic Race" (or something like that), where you play a beefy cyborg in a sci-fi foot-race shoot-em-up.

15 years later, I made Non-Stop Action Hero, where the presentation is very similar: the "running" is just a static animation against a background that scrolls at a constant rate.

When coming up with ideas, I always try to put myself in that younger mindset, back when anything seemed possible.

Joe

[Anthony Flack]

Hundreds of games. Almost all unfinished. Almost all extremely derivative of other games, or what I imagined other games might be like by looking at screenshots in magazines. Some quite good looking, but they were terrible things. They almost always ended up bogging down and running at a crawl.

It was the work of someone who was learning to program and animate graphics, and not doing a bad job, but not even beginning to be a game designer.

Actually a few of them weren't bad, and were quite original. I think they were flukes though, due to the massive number of games made.

[AnthemAudio]

My grandfather used to program games on the Commodore 64. I would go into the programs and change as many things as possible, mostly text though. He made this bizzare all text boxing game that I turned into an all text jousting game. He said that was a much better idea than his so from that day I knew I would be a programmer.

Of course now the only code I know is the one that gets you 30 lives in Contra but I'm still in the same area.

Tony

[Midnight Synergy]

Originally Posted by AnthemAudio

My grandfather used to program games on the Commodore 64.

I suddenly feel old. So very old.

I did a lot of experimental games on the C64 in the 80s. A few made it out as shareware/PD, but a lot of stuff was unfinished. Like Anthony, I designed a lot of games based on what I thought other games might play like. I had, for example, seen a single screenshot of Ultima III, and started designing what I thought the game might play like - I got it totally wrong, of course.

I also tried my hands on as many different genres as I could think of. Hence the many unfinished projects - including a vector-graphics based space shooter, a text adventure parser, an Archon-like strategy game, and several attempts to get a good game based on the asteroids sequence in Empire Strikes Back - something I still would like to manage one day.

[Sharpfish]

I did, and I forgot all about them until you asked!

The very first "games" I loosely designed/attempted to make were single screen simplistic affairs on my fondly remembered ZX Spectrum around 1986. I recall doing something with the tiny character gfx that would fit into a single block and attempting to make a helicopter/skyscraper game which was derivitive of any number of other games (hey I was 11!).

Then for a while I got more into actually dreaming up games rather than making them. Maybe others can remember (U.K), a few years later there was a free tape stuck on the front of Crash Magazine each month and there was this one game with a Tank (it was a flick screen platformer) called Action Farce(or Force) II if I remember correctly. Anyway I poked around in the source code and unlocked the editor that the game was made with!!! this was an amazing discovery at the time and it allowed you to make a platform game fairly easily. I would sit in my English lessons at the back with my "games" folder and draw maps of typically 8-bit flick screen games (which I still have a fondness for) inspired by Dizzy, Technician Ted and Exolon. These "maps" would be quite detailed with object placement, room names, gfx tile layouts and heavy themes...


... I never built a single one of them! The thought of making them was enough (and it wasn't like anyone else was going to play them anyway at that time without PD libraries or the internet).

I also wrote a mini text adventure with chip music called "Downtown" which was probably quite seedy in intent (esp for my age) and had copper bar hacks and a mish mash of routines I had taken from the computer mags of the day to try and spruce it up.

All of the above were terrible and no I wouldn't re-work any of them.

Once I got an Amiga I started designing games more seriously, made some money from one as licenceware (or naive ware) and gave most away on Crazy Joes PD discs (which was like the internet back then )

I also made use of the classic "Freescape Construction Kit" by Incentive software, built a complete "game" called 'Ghostship' and was proud to see it and my details mentioned in a Competition in one of the leading Amiga Magazines at the time (sadly a noteworthy entry rather than a winner). This is also available on Assasins PD Compilation discs (and it was on the covermounted disc of the Mag IIRC) I was 16 when I did that and It was the first full game I did for the Amiga, obviously it didn't compare to UnrealEd

Not particularly proud of any of them either, one of them (the licenceware one) had something that I would like to revisit with modern tech though it was again, mostly derivitive.

So there is my life story, and I'm at post count 999 now and I promised myself that I would not Hit 1000 on this forum as I was saving it for my game announcement (which should be finally here sometime this decade! ), but I love nostalgia threads, couldn't help myself.

[lapskaus]

I'm actually working on a game that i started dreaming about when i was about 12 or so. Probably even less. Me and a friend would draw scetches of the different buildings and spaceships for it, but it stopped there since we didn't have any idea how to actually make it happen. Code?

I remember my first attempt at making a game. I'd draw up a bunch of full screen frames of the game in deluxe paint on my amiga, save it on a floppy, and expected it to run just like that. Because, you know, back then we thought computers were smart, so the computer could surely figure this out. It wasn't until later i figured out that computers are utterly stupid and won't do anything unless someone tells it to do it. I got amos later, a basic like programming package, and got some sprites to move around on the screen and stuff, but i didn't understand i had to check for collisions and stuff myself. I still expected my smart computar machine to figure it out for me :P

[Moose2000]

Originally Posted by Sharpfish

These "maps" would be quite detailed with object placement, room names, gfx tile layouts and heavy themes...

... I never built a single one of them!

Oh, happy memories of designing platform games on graph paper at the back of class! I did finish mine, but 48K was too big for a type-in listing in a magazine, and there weren't no internet back then.

I did get one of my games published in a magazine, for the princely sum of £50. It was 20 years before I got my next cheque for a game.


The one game design I came up with as a kid that wasn't a blatant clone of something else involved breeding monsters with genetically determined teeth, claws, shells and so on, and getting them to fight. I've come back to the idea repeatedly since, but never managed to sit down and write it. I always end up adding loads of 'cool stuff' to it, it becomes too complex, and I fail to get started.

[MibUK]

Originally Posted by Ricardo C

I came up with a few games in the early 80s. I must have been seven or eight. Very simplistic stuff, but I still think they could have been fun at the time. The one I remember best is "Supermarket", a single-screen game where you race up and down the aisles trying to fill a shopping list while dodging obstacles (spills, other shoppers, etc.) It was probably inspired by Activision's Frostbite.


Maybe I should try to make it now, who knows? Could be a passable casual game.

Very tempted to steal and run That seriously sounds like a good game idea for a small casual game. Sounds kinda paperboy as well.

Hijacking the thread slightly, I designed loads of game swhen I was young with a freind, but we also did something else that I wondered whether other people did it.
We independantly came up with certain ideas that alreayd existed but didn't know about.

Two examples, one of our first bigger games on the Amiga was a roleplaying game,a nd you could walk around the island. At first we had a logic bit when you moved that did checks like,
if (x > 320 && y < 200) cantpass = true; if (x < 320 && y > 100) cantpass = true;
and so on, meaning that we encoded the edges of the map into if statements that menats you couldn't walk over water, and we also added impassable mountains, which were done the same way.
After a bit of thought, we realised that if we had a grid style map, we could keep an array of ones and zeros that meant the map was passable or not, and so we tried it and realised we had invented a whole new technique for building maps (we later changed the numebr to inidcate tile graphic as well). Imagine our suprise and chagrin when we discovered that everybody else had been doing this for ten or fifteen years already.

But I digress, Did anybody else manage to come up with an algorithm or way of doing something that you weren't aware of, but already actually existed?

[LilGames]

Originally Posted by MibUK

But I digress, Did anybody else manage to come up with an algorithm or way of doing something that you weren't aware of, but already actually existed?

Yes. I invented anti-aliasing in 1987. :-D

Not an algorithm for it, but using it when drawing bitmap graphics. I started on the C64 plotting my "paintings" one pixel at a time. I discovered that if I used varying shades of a color I could "smooth" out jaggies, or even make pixels appear to come to a sharp "point".

Well imagine my shock when, after starting my first real job in the game industry as an artist (1991) I discovered this technique already had a name!

[alfie]

I remember the name of a game I designed as a kid "flickochet racers", probably 30 years ago, but for the life of me I cannot remember what the design was

[papillon]

While I did fool around with certain amounts of programming toys as a kid, they were _extremely_ limited tools and anything I could come up with then would not be terribly interesting now. (I had LOGO, some sort of branching-path storygame generator that would only let you put two choices at any branch, and a TI-82 that I spent the entirety of Algebra II playing with rather than paying any attention to the teacher. We were allowed the calculators on all tests up until the final exam, too. I think you can imagine what happened to me when the final came around. ) I'm sure I made something resembling a game using HyperCard at school at some point, but I don't remember details at all, and I didn't have a Mac at home.

Mostly my brain was tied up in RPGs and The Great Fantasy Novel. I was more interested in writing - which explains why the first things I can really call completed computer games by me would be text adventures, after I found TADS in university.

[lexaloffle]

I also spent years churning out copies of games I saw in the arcades and magazine screenshots before it even occured to me to try something new. When I was 14 I made a game in CGA called 'BLOX', which later became 'TRI' in 1993 (My first shareware release) and 'Neko Puzzle' in 2003. My business wouldn't be alive without it, so I certainly don't look back and laugh now.

However, I do look back and laugh at 'Sneezy' - a very badly written game about an alien hedgehog trying to find his spaceship on a planet occupied by hostile robotic pie throwing machines. And my attempt to make ascii Moon Patrol without knowing about variables, by manually unrolling all of the control logic into a rapidly expanding BASIC program.

Ahh.. enough reminiscin'.

[Uhfgood]

I feel bad now. I never did anything like that. In fact I didn't even start programming till I was like 15 or 16, and even then I didn't do much. It wasn't till I started getting serious in 97 with C that I started to make anything decent.

No wonder I can't finish anything now.

[mahlzeit]

Jungle Commando! A clone of Jungle Hunt. You were a soldier with a big gun standing on a tree branch and you had to catch the rope to land in the tree on the other side of the screen. Unlike the ropes in Jungle Hunt, though, this rope only had 3 positions: to the left, middle, and right. All you had to do was press the joystick left when the rope was in the "right" position and you'd safely swing to the other tree -- or otherwise plunge to your death. Then you'd reappear in the first tree and you had to do it all over again. That was it!

It's still on a C64 floppy somewhere. I really should get one of those cables that let you connect the C64 disk drive to your PC and turn all those old games into D64 files...

Like many of the other posters, I copied game screenshots from magazines. Usually when I had the basics working, I'd get bored of the game and move on to another. I haven't kept a tally, but I've probably made over a 100 of these "games", if not more, in the past 20 years. And look where it got me.

Seriously though, I believe such experimenting is essential. In any medium.

[Popcorn Boy]

Growing up, I didn't have an Atari. My uncle worked for an electronics store that carried a large amount of Magnavox products, so instead we had an Odyssey 2 (which I loved, btw). Some real good games there. Anyway, at 7 years old I put together a "design doc" with crayon illustrations of a Pitfall-like adventure game called Jungle Safari. I sent it to Magnavox along with a note that if they made the game to please send me a copy. Anyway, I was crushed to receive a letter back that although they appreciated the submission, they require their game designers to be able to program the games as well as design them. Didn't stop me from coming up with about 4-5 more indepth designs and dozens of additional packaging concepts. I still have the letter (framed now). Still haven't developed Jungle Safari, though I did do some very preliminary work with GameMaker a few years back.

[Musenik]

The earliest, purposeful, game design work I did were nuclear option rules for Avalon Hill's Kriegspiel. I must have been twelve. I remember in particular, trying to make the rules 'fair' for both sides, without overwhelming the regular game. I went on to make all sorts of mods for various games.

In high school, I wrote a 3D space combat game for our districts Dec-10. It used text graphics on a terminal with a 2400 baud modem.

My final project for my first college graphics class was a 4x space sim. This was on a Techtronix phosphor flat screen with a manual refresh. I think it was hooked up to our university's Sigma 6.

[arcadetown]

Designed and made a boat load of crappy Atari 800 games in basic. Made a rather decent missile command game called Missile Attack using my best basic skills.

Download Missile Attack for the PC which is latest version did in C about 16 years ago.

Showcase was an Atari 800 6502 assembly game called Hellcat Warrior and Starfire Warrior, the later published by Datasoft when I was 15.

[arcadetown]

Originally Posted by mahlzeit

It's still on a C64 floppy somewhere. I really should get one of those cables that let you connect the C64 disk drive to your PC and turn all those old games into D64 files...

You're lucky. I tossed all my old Atari 800 floppies in late 80s long after my Atari 800 had stopped working. No idea emulators would ever exist.

[Nexic]

Hmm... Burl Fisher? I recognise that name from somewhere *checks email*, I smell a conspiracy!

[PoV]

Originally Posted by LilGames

How many of you have game design concepts that you came up with as a kid...

Oh I'm still a kid, I'm 26. That'll probably still be the case long after I kick it.

I have versions of games I coded 10 years ago, though I only have source backups from the past 8. I do still have some C64 floppies with some really old Commodore Basic experiments, and some ancient pixel art from as far back as 18 years ago, I just need to find a way to get the data. But even still, in my off computer time, I managed to take years of notes and doodles for game concepts, inspired by the cartoons and games I was playing or reading about in Nintendo Power magazine. I get a kick out of digging through my design material found on perferated dot matrix printer paper, laser paper, and what graph paper I had. A fun way to spend an evening.

One of these days when I have the time, I'm planning to organize my ancient stuff. Scan some old drawings for my amusement, and do some modern reinterpretations of the art for kicks. Cheesy derivative concepts or not, it should be a hoot.

[Midnight Synergy]

Originally Posted by arcadetown

You're lucky. I tossed all my old Atari 800 floppies in late 80s long after my Atari 800 had stopped working. No idea emulators would ever exist.

Ditto - when I sold our C64 I included all my work disks. It would have been great to see things again 20 years later. Thankfully I kept everything from then on (Atari ST and DOS).

[Popcorn Boy]

Originally Posted by arcadetown

Showcase was an Atari 800 6502 assembly game called Hellcat Warrior and Starfire Warrior, the later published by Datasoft when I was 15.

Is this it?

http://gury.atari8.info/details_games/1736.htm

[dislekcia]

I'm jealous of all the C64s you guys had access to while growing up!

I used to draw mazes on paper for my friends to solve. Ended up making an entire "adventure" system where people had to go back to previous mazes they'd gotten through to find items under flaps I'd cut into the paper... I remember a torch you had to find, without it I wouldn't give you the maze for when you entered a dark cave because you couldn't see it

My dad spent a bit of time making games that had research/educational angles to them. Mathematical solving games that pushed you to calculate larger and larger numbers in your head, mastermind games that would scale themselves and their difficulty according to how well you were doing, etc.

I only really got into programming games once we got introduced to LOGO at school. Then I made strange little machinima Terminator ripoffs and one tennis game where the ball "broke" the screen if you missed...

Since high school I've been storing ideas (got two files filled now) and I keep going back for inspiration when I feel a particular game needs something.

[Artinum]

I came up with a game idea in my mid-late teenage years called UNIT (United Nations Infiltration Team). This would have been a turn-based combat game akin to the Battlescape in the Xcom games, but with some Syndicate influence. I didn't know at the time that there was a UNIT in Doctor Who, or I'd have reconsidered the name (and names are always the hardest part for me to think up!)

The basic plot was that a religious group, the Order of the Flame (cue cool looking religious emblem of a triangle with flames in) had managed to take over the world. Quite how they managed this was a mystery to world governments but they suddenly had some very powerful hardware and weirder stuff than that was happening. Then some bright spark came up with the UNITs - teams of crack soldiers dropped into combat and taking down the enemy with tactical strikes. At first they worked well. Then they started getting captured and it was discovered that several of the team operating them were secret Order members. Eventually one last, rookie UNIT was assembled...

I not only came up with a complex plot for this game, I designed logos, thought up weapons, invented new technologies for the player to discover, planned most of the missions in the first part of the game and planned general mission ideas for the other parts. The entire project never went anywhere because I lacked the graphical, audial, musical and programming skills to do any of it. My biggest success in programming was a multiple choice text adventure game called "The Rather Silly War" back in school.

I'm much better at thinking of games than developing them. Any coding teams out there struggling for ideas...?

[arcadetown]

Originally Posted by Popcorn Boy

Is this it?

http://gury.atari8.info/details_games/1736.htm

Holly crap yes!! Haven't seen that for years. Even found a Starfire Warrior materials here with better screen shots and a dump file. Last time searched a couple years ago found nothing. Now just need to find a good Atari 800 emulator and...

Hmm... guess pirates are good for something after all.

Edit: Found a good Atari 800 emulator here and viola I'm now playing my old Starfire Warrior. Rock on!! Can't believe even the sound effects play perfect. Check those screen shots, not bad for 15 year old kid programmer art eh?

Wow and even found some of my old basic games there