Since it’s Throwback Thursday and all (and since I’m waiting on a driver install and need something to do for about three minutes), I thought it might be fun to look back at our first ever games!
For me, other than working my way through the old Brackey’s tutorial to make an endless ball-rolling game, the first one I ever made and completed was Good Luck With The Lamps, a very basic pixel art platformer where you’re just a normal regular bear trying to turn all his lamps off and go to bed.
But the lamps have other ideas! spooky hand wave
This was for the “My First Game Jam” Summer 2020 edition which lasted about two weeks, if it’d been any less there’s no way we could have finished. I say “we” because this was actually a joint effort between me and my SO, who afterwards vowed never to work with me again lol.
Things learned:
- If you’re doing pixel art the pixels should probably all be the same size
- Unity’s tilemap system
- Basic 2d animations
- How to make a cut scene
- I hate making platformers!
Ok, your turn!
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My first game doesn’t really exist anymore. All that exists is a gif. As in, it was so small and very tiny that a gif can display the whole thing. I used phaser because I didn’t know any other languages besides javascript, and it was pretty awful. My friend did the art and talked about ideas. What was made was basically a prototype of some kind of gameplay, but it’s really not much. I…didn’t learn a whole lot. It was for the ludum dare that’s theme was ‘sacrifice’.
So we make Sacrifice Quack. I enjoy it only because the duck getting chucked chaining effect is very funny lol.
Kinda gutted it no longer exists tbh, I am so intrigued by this 😆
My first games were with scratch, but my first real, finished game with a proper game engine was Rampant. It was an endless top down shooter with a basic upgrade system. It isn’t very good, it gets boring fast, and I think it’s framerate dependent. But I remember it being fun to work on.
I’d be very surprised if anyone’s very first attempt was actually good! (and also I might hate them a bit)
Just downloaded Rampant, I’ll give it a whirl after work. Always interesting to see where people got their start, imo. And it’s important to remember that what seems like at least 50% of “game devs” never even complete a single game, so both of our crappy first entries put us ahead of the curve there 😄
Yeah behind that game is a bunch of unfinished unity projects… I 100% agree that for game devs (or any creative field, really) it’s so important to just get something to the finish line, at least for a first project.
You’re super right… I’ve been working on some top down prototype in Godot with an office worker guy, who walks around in some golden fields with some pixel art. I gotta finish that. Thanks for the motivation.
I made this back in may 2019, it was my first release, since then, I’ve made many other games https://rezioz.itch.io/confined-geometry
To be more precise, I started this one long ago, back in 2016 in Game Maker 8, and I quickly dropped it. Many years later, in 2019, I decided to complete it and to release it. I remember having a hard time to migrate it to Game Maker Studio fixing all compatibilities issues.
I’m thinking of making a sequel (maybe in 3D), but I’m not sure about this…
Good lord I am so terrible at this game, my pb is like 21 seconds 🤦♀️
The first games I ever made were so long ago…text-based adventure games on the ZX Spectrum in BASIC, and being a kid at the time (~10 years old) I had no concept of programming properly or structuring anything. It was just strings being displayed based on input.
The only one I remember is a Superman game.
Bit of a belated reply but you know, this got me thinking. Technically I suppose my first “game” would’ve been back in the day in BASIC as well, although where you draw the line between “game” and “just a very basic program that is interactive and a small child is amazed by” might determine if it counts lol.
I’m gonna be dating myself a bit here haha, but I released my first game in 2011. It’s even still available to play if you have flash player lol. https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/576782
2011?! Hey! Some of us were already in our late twenties by then…
I sadly do not have Flash, but 50% of your reviews gave it a score of 10 so I’m sure it’s amazing! 😄
I haven’t been coding games since I graduated. But in the last two semesters we had a game jam and this was the result. The topic was survival. You play a obese man sitting on a vehicle trying to eat unhealthy food to survive. https://gamejolt.com/games/hungry-shopping/44460
my first real game was A Single Radish made for a Godot game jam a couple years ago. it’s inspired by the single Japanese radish post from tumblr. it was the first game I ever finished.
I learned a lot about coding, but more about how to make a complete feeling experience with limited time and ability. asset design has always been a big stopping point for my projects, but concentrating on a four color palette with simple sprites allowed me to work much quicker. if anyone plays it though you may notice the walls are viewed at an odd angle that led to way more work with tile variations. it also featured the first cutscene I’ve ever made which due to the crunch of a game jam is made of the messiest spaghetti.
I’d like to do a “Super Single Radish” one day and improve on everything.
The very first game I can remember making as a kid was a dumb space shooter that I made with Game Maker for MS-DOS (no relation to the modern Game Maker), but the first one I released to the public was a basic platformer called Godawful Quest. It was made for the “I Can’t Draw” game jam in 2019, which I saw as an opportunity to finally release something with no pressure to make it look pretty. The whole thing also ended up being a metaphor for a lot of my frustration in trying to make games up to that point.
The most important thing I learned from it was how to scope and finish something.
It’s not necessarily worth playing, but here it is anyway:
