Have you ever tried making a game?

I've been reading lately a lot about various programming languages ever since I started using Visual Basic to make work easier and I've thought about programming a simple game. There's a lot of free engines out there like Epic's Unreal development Kit, so what games have you made if any? and what programs/languages did you use?

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I've made shitty games with Unity and Gamemaker. I've made shittier games in Java.

I kinda tried, but it was nothing special. Without the proper knowledge and resources I just couldn't.

@nonused: I've heard of those two. Unity in particular looked like it had bunch of options, which would probably overwhelm someone with no experience

Yes, I programmed a stupid little Magic-like card game in Visual Basic. It didn't really work and was pretty horrible though but then again I just did it to kill some time and train my VB skills.

Also I once made an entire AoE 2 Campaign using the ingame editor and a CS 1.6 map. They were pretty bad as well but since I never shared them with anybody anyway it doesn't really matter I guess.

@abendlaender: I don't know how you got that to work in VBA. I mostly use VBA in conjunction with excel. I've done similar things with in game editors. It usually just amounted to making as many units as possible and have them fight each other.

I made a matching game in VB in high school for a programming class. I really hated programming, which is sad because I wish I could express myself through game development :(

VBA is not the Visual Basic people are referring to here. VBA is built into Office products while Visual Basic is a stand alone language that actually compile to their own .EXEs and .DLLs.

No, i suck at math. Well i don't necessarily suck at it, i just hate it.

I could be an "idea guy"? I dunno!

I'm super indie so I made a bunch of text adventures in C++.

And by that I mean that I suck at programming and that was all I could do for a long time. I could do some Java stuff now if I wanted, probably some Python too. I don't really have a desire to learn to make games. I prefer to keep my programming separate from games because it kinda ruins them for me. After figuring out how Civ worked it kinda ruined part of it for me.

I've never made anything all that expansive, but I have messed around with making games off and on for quite a while. The first game I ever made was an ASCII based space invaders clone written in C. I also did a bit of stuff in C++ around that time. In more recent years, I've primarily just gone in the direction of AS3 and more recently Unity simply because of how quickly you can get something up and running.

@tycobb: But other than the fact that Visual Basic can compile, I'm assuming the syntax and most everything else is the same, right?

@chaser324: Absolutely, writing code can be tedious when all you want is an easy way to make a game. I don't know why Carmack enjoys it so much

@chaser324:

Yea, whatever happened to that Ice T (although now I feel like I'm thinking of somebody else) beat-em-up you were working on? Is that still happening, or has that been put off to the side?

@ben_h: I'm guessing it's mostly a bunch of "If..then.." statements? I feel like all games are "If...then.." statements. I WANT LOOPS DAMMIT

@clonedzero: You're in luck, the vast majority of game programming has nothing to do with complex math. Unless you're coding graphics you're in the clear.

@video_game_king: Ice Cube. I decided not to proceed with it for a number of reasons. For one, I think I let my imagination outpace my available time and artistic abilities, but above that, I also just decided that I'd rather not spend a bunch of time making a game that leans so heavily on dumb referential humor and memes.

@patriot91: I do not believe so. VBA is a redheaded stepchild. I am pretty sure that the VBA that is in Office 2010 is still Visual Basic 6 even though Visual Basic has been bastardized into .NET since 2001.

I am almost 99% positive that VBA7 is still all COM and ActiveX based. That would mean your equivalent language would be Visual Basic 6 that has been out since 1998. Visual Basic .NET which is the newest iteration has almost no similarities to VB6 except for the most basic syntax.

Quick Edit: When you write properties to house a string or an integer, are you are writing Get and Let, or are you writing Get and Set? Let was deprecated in the .NET version.

Well, games are one giant loop if that makes you feel better =)

I make games, C++ and C# mainly.

@patriot91 said:

I didn't mean to imply that I like AS3 or Unity because I don't like code. I never would've pursued a career as a software engineer and gotten a MS in computer engineering if I hated writing code. In my opinion, the appeal of things like AS3 and to an even greater extent Unity really is just the speed of development. We aren't all wealthy programmers like Carmack or Notch that have the luxury of working with games all day every day, so I prefer to maximize my game coding time by leveraging powerful robust engines.

You convinced me! I'll join your team!

I've had a game idea in mind for a while, but neither the coding nor art expertise to make it happen.

Back in high school, I dicked around with QBASIC and made some really simple text adventures. You could say they were almost... basic. HEYO!

My first endevour was the text fighting game Mortal Kombat for the calculator Texas Instruments TI-80. It was a game probably harder than even the toughest console Mortal Kombat games. It was nigh impossible to beat.

My second game was possibly Tic Tac Toe. It was a fine game, appart from the moronic A.I., which wasn't the fault of the programmer, but of the time and budget constraints! Ok, it was my fault!

The third was Conway's Game of Life which went fine.

@jeust: Oh god... I forgot all about programming for the old TI calculators. I used to have a TI-86 and TI-89 that may or may not have been stolen since I paid $20 for them. Those were so much fun to program for, but also a pain in the ass.

For shits and giggles, I just looked at the TI site to see if they still sell the same ol' calculators. It appears that the calculators nowadays are flipping insane (TI-Nspire CX). They seem to be the same price as the TI-89 from when I went to school; maybe even cheaper.

I have a dozen unfinished GameMaker 6 and 7 games lying around on an external hard drive.

But the real stuff is the twenty-five QBasic programs I wrote (or copied line for line from textbooks) that lies on the same drive.

Does using Blender's game engine count? If so, then yes. I tried playing around with it and mad a cube car drive around a track, with semi-realistic physics and raced to a song. :) It took a whopping 2 hours. Then I made an airplane that looks like a flying whale and flew it around another race track. And that took about 20 minutes.

Pure art, I know. I'm accepting pre-orders ;)

If my laptop wasn't such crap, I would probably take it more seriously. But I can't possibly do anything I would want to do working with just a B960 CPU and an IntelHD graphics card.

I've worked with teams in making games; though, my main contribution was art and design. Flash and Unity are rather accessible though.

It's a challenge, but if you stick with it, you'll get the hang of it. :)

Nope. I've thought about it, but quickly realized that it can really be challenging.

I'm a programming student, so I've made a few basic games for university projects

I made a twine game

I've been messing around with java for like a year now. Nothing that would really deserve to be called a game has come out of that, but I'm having fun trying out different things. Stuff I made include a very basic version of a card game and an isometric adventure game kinda thing with tile based movement (and glorious 3-frame character animation), dialogue trees and an inventory system.

The "coding" I'm doing mainly consists of writing layered "if"- and "for"-loops and trying to call the right method at the right time, so it's just really simple stuff.

I've made 3 things I'd be happy to call games. Started in Python (not ideal) but made a pretty large (for my first ever game) Starcraft inspired wave based survival game, and then used XNA to take part in a Ludum Dare. I blogged about them here. My only team project is an unfinished game in Java, a sort of MetroidVania style thing.

More recently I've started trying to create a BomberMan clone (WIP) to learn Unity, more than anything else really.

Yeah! They were awesome to program for, and you could also share your programs. Games were flying around in the classrooms from calculator to calculator! ahah

Today's TI calculators are insane in terms of features, but the good ol' TI-80 still has a place in my heart. :)

Who else here is going to try Project Spark? I finished watching yet another 1 hour demo and I'm really impressed with the depth and the when/do ai and programming interface seems so great for getting stuff up and running. As well as the different types of games you can do with it. In 1 hour they were able to go from a bare world, to a mini platform/adventure sequence complete with platforming, leveling up, coin fetching and weapon placement and usage, acquiring powerups, and using fireballs on titan goblins. Plus it turns out it's using voxels. Never played with a voxel engine before. With multiplayer and online voice and motion capture, it seems pretty ideal for getting started in actually trying to create a real game without all the nasty coding and prep work.

No. But if anyone would want ideas for a game whether its the name of the game or what to put in the game then come to me! I have lots of ideas.

I've only ever made stuff within existing games - I made a couple of weird campaigns for Age of Kings (including a system where you trained peasants at different buildings to make units, which I stand by that Battle Realms ripped off from me!), and played with a bunch of other RTSes like Dark Reign, Red Alert, etc

I also made some Quake and Half-Life levels and half arsed mods.

The most in depth and unique I got was an attempt at creating a total conversion for Neverwinter Nights that turned it into the Wheel of Time. I managed to get a magic system working that was a decent approximation for Channelling, but I was too young and not smart enough to get it all the way.

I was always more comfortable writing than I was getting my hands dirty anyway.

A text adventure and some incomplete Duke3D maps... I'm no game designerman, it turns out.

@tycobb: I occasionally use "set", but I mostly use the statement "Dim...As..." if that's what you're asking

I tried learning game coding with C++ but never made it too far. Most tutorials I came across were like:

Step 1: Declare simple variable

Step 2: Declare simple loop

Step 3: Do a bunch of advanced, complicated stuff without properly explaining it

Step 4: Done

I also worked on a sniper game in flash that actually made it far enough to have a working scope and hit detection, but little else, and I had at least a dozen crappy RPG Maker projects.

I'd still like to get involved with game development, but only as a hobby. My programming job now is not nearly as stressful and pays well enough that I wouldn't want switch careers and possibly ruin my favorite thing. Despite that, with every game I play, I can't help but try to envision how they coded certain systems. Knowing how complicated game programming is, I just have to give a lot of respect to those that do it for a living.

@patriot91: Yea... no. I'll just make it easy and say if you ever wanted to make a game, make it in any other language that is not VB. You will find a lot more tutorials for what you want to do and chances are the language is just better all around.

I've never made what I'd call a full game, but I've done prototypes of stuff and smaller games. I've done things on PC, in-browser, for the Xbox 360, and for Android using Java, C#, C++, and C. If just want to start building a game and seeing an end product as quickly as possible, I recommend downloading and using Game Maker. If you actually want to get into the programming side and you already know how to use Visual Basic, I'd say make sure you know the basics of C# and start learning to use the XNA framework, that stuff's not too hard.

I made hells of games in high school math class on my TI-82.

TI-BASIC, programming language of kings.

I got my start in nuclear engineering, simulating reactors. Moved on to weather models. I decided to try a few games for fun. Most of the simulations I programmed used scripted languages, so object oriented was new for me. I made a simple space invaders game using XNA and Visual Studio Express one night. After that I went on to iOS programming for contractual work and made a simple terraria type game, but didn't pursue it further. I may revisit it, it was pretty fun. I've messed around in Unity and I'm finally getting good at taking pictures, making them tillable, creating normal maps, and such to make decent textures. I also started working with 3D modeling programs. Its a lot to learn, but I'm lucky to have a physics background, so a lot of the AI, rigid body mechanics, and such come naturally. I've dabbled in programming shaders. I hope to slowly learn while working my normal job so that I can do a proper game some day. I need to buy Unity Pro, it looks so much better with real-time shadows!

I downloaded gamemaker once, but saw all the license crap and opted out. Tried to learn some programming languages on my own, simple ones like Ruby and python, but my attention span is to low for all that. I wanted to get into the art side at one point, but never did.