Being a kid making games in the early 2000s

If you were lucky, there was a tutorial how to do X. But requires tool Y. Where do you get Y? Here it is on some apache indexed site! Oh, I just installed Sp0rk3h. Well, time to reformat and reinstall Windows XP. Good thing I partitioned my 40gB HDD

The learning curve for Photoshop 7, when there are 0 resources was pretty tough. I remember how proud I was when I figured out how to make an animated gif. Hammer editor (Was it called Hammer? to make maps for Half-Life engine games like Counter-Strike), There was an editor for creating an archive of images. was it a .WAD archive?

That kind of self-directed learning without hand-holding, I think, is not a bad thing

I think I'm glad I didn't discover 4chan or SA back then - my sense of humor was pretty horrible and edgy by itself (in my head I call it "proto-4chan"). I don't think I needed to see anything that would encourage it. South Park and Maddox were probably my biggest influences back then.

Every little feature in my games, no matter how small, felt like a revelation. Each mistake and new mechanic opened new worlds for me (even small things like inventing strategies to key out transparent backgrounds, automatic collision detection, etc). All of that drove my attention to how stuff works under the hood. My first encounter was with BlitzBasic, though, not the GameMaker.

I guess that creative feeling during those first attempts triggered my live long passion for programming. I've been coding for ~ 20 years now, but it all started with a crappy 2D game on my weak PC.

Eventually I learned you don't really need it and felt a bit sad. Similar sadness I feel now that LLMs write all the code for you.

The online groups where we made games together, the tons of ideas and concept art sketches in school notebooks, ZZT as someone else mentioned, the PACKARD BELL...

It surfaced this in my memory too, havent thought about it in a few decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Hamster_Republic_Role...

This guy's dad was so supportive at such a tender stage in life, that was the part I liked the best.

It was hilarious. I didn't know what I was doing, but the dos aesthetics and the many options for FF style attacks made me really happy at the time.

- borrowing a BASIC game-making book from the library and hand-typing programs into QBASIC on my uncle's computer, trying to figure out how to translate the slightly-different BASIC dialect in the book on the fly

- making my own ZZT[0] games for an audience of one: myself. When I discovered the web later and learned that there was a huge community of ZZT makers out there, I was floored.

I have made several games as an adult, but none of those experiences has really been as much fun as those early ones.

[0] https://museumofzzt.com/

It could represent how the web was in the 90s, but it doesn't represent what readers like these days. I sent this post to my friend and said to just open it in reader mode. Our eyes are not as sharp as in the 90s my friend.

Nice to see the list of people included on here, including FAIND (Fallen Angel Industries). Furry, Factor X, Tango Strike, the list goes on. So many great, fun games to come out of that crew. Joakim "Konjak" Sandberg is still going strong.

This was a world running parallel to things like RPG Maker, Game Maker and Flash. I'm glad someone did a write up of this, I hardly saved anything from those days.

On a phone, they make a really poor reading experience.