Discussion What was the game that made you decide to try gamedev?

fishfern

Member
Hi Everyone!

Pretty much what it says on the tin, what the game that inspired you to try your hand at game creation? Does your work still reflect this influence?

Have a great day!

Edit: I wasn't so much inspired by a single game, but rather a demo of Game Maker 7 that came on an old CD-Rom collection of game demos with a kids magazine back when I was about nine or ten. I remember playing around with it, having no idea what to do, but being so totally fascinated by the prospect of building my own game.
 
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Welcome to the forums! I suggest you start the conversation by sharing your answer to the question first, to get the ball rolling. That is the done thing to do I believe, also recommended by the forum guidelines.
 

K12gamer

Member
Played a few fan made GM Sandbox games a long time ago...

The real basic Pong / Pacman / Break Out types of GM games made me want to give it a try.
Felt it was something I could probably do.

Was intimidated by GM games like Gray and Green from Granite Gear...Why? Because they were so good.

 

fishfern

Member
Welcome to the forums! I suggest you start the conversation by sharing your answer to the question first, to get the ball rolling. That is the done thing to do I believe, also recommended by the forum guidelines.
Oops, I must have totally missed that section, thanks for the heads up!


Played a few fan made GM Sandbox games a long time ago...

The real basic Pong / Pacman / Break Out types of GM games made me want to give it a try.
Felt it was something I could probably do.

Was intimidated by GM games like Gray and Green from Granite Gear...Why? Because they were so good.
Honestly, I still feel like that with some of the incredible games people make. I'm pretty comfortable with GML and the GM system these days, but lots people manage to make some downright amazing stuff. It's inspirational as heck though!
 

woodsmoke

Member
I was playing the excellent GTA1 in 2013 and because the frame rate is horrific 20fps?? for such a fast game I thought I should make my own top down GTA with 60fps. So I Google'd game making. Of course I quickly found out I do not have the skills as a gamedev noob to make GTA game.
 

pixeltroid

Member
What was the game that made you decide to try gamedev?
The very first game I ever owned was Super Mario Land 2 for the Gameboy. Ever since I played it I started designing "sequels" for it on paper.

But the first time I made a game that could be played were a few custom levels for the awesome indie platformer game "Plazma Burst 2". I remember working with alarms, doors, elevators and triggers. Unfortunately I've lost those projects. :(

Does your work still reflect this influence?
Yeah. To an extent.
 
Oops, I must have totally missed that section, thanks for the heads up!
Hmmm...maybe its not explicitly in the forum guidelines after all...I just remember seeing it mentioned somewhere - perhaps a moderator posted it - that if you are going to make a post that is a question, at least share your answer to it as well to get things moving...anyways...I do think its a good question you asked.

For me, no single game. I just remember always being interested in all types of games, electronic or otherwise. And when I learned that you could make a computer interact with someone via code, I was hooked. I think it was a simple BASIC program, someone showed me how to make the computer ask "What's your name?", and after typing your name, the computer would type back, saying "Hello, <Name>!". :squirrel: :banana:

Some key games I remember though were really old ones like one of the original blocky two-player TANK type games, a single screen combat thing.

And I remember my young mind being blown away by the visual and aural feasts of Outrun and Ghosts and Goblins on the C64, which were awesome for the time.

Another key tipping point was when I bought the book The Game Makers Apprentice, which was had Game Maker 7 included, and taught how to make several simple games. It was after playing around with that I decided to get serious about Game Making and enrolled in a game programming school as an adult to kick start a career change from dry corporate IT jobs and into the creative if not-as-lucrative arena of Game Dev.
 

RujiK

Member
I've always wanted to make games. When I was 5-ish, I used to draw these weird underground maze pictures in mspaint and wish that I could turn it into a game. Like this:


Here is some gameplay of the first "game" I ever made. I used to sometimes play it with my brother and we would talk our "players" and run from monsters.


(Yes, I really did that.)

When I was 12-ish, my dad bought the game Operation Flashpoint, which had a full mission editor with scripting support:

I'm pretty sure I spent 1000s of hours scripting and designing my own little worlds. It was a blast and taught me the basics of coding.

So I guess I've always WANTED to code, but Operation Flashpoint was the first game that actually let me.
 
There's probably not one specific game, but rather fangames in general. This was long before indie games were popular -- even before indie classics like Cave Story and La-Mulana were released -- so seeing that ordinary people could make actual video games you could play and enjoy was a real revelation. Story time:

Almost 20 years back, a family member once brought a Star Wars fan-movie to show me. I thought, "hey, I wonder if people have made fan-games!" So I look up "kirby fan games" on the premier search engine, Yahoo! There was a website that hosted a couple of games. There weren't any really good Kirby fan games besides an average RPG Maker Fan OC RPG, so I wondered if Mario fan games were easier to find. Enter Mario Fan Games Galaxy. Hundreds of games. Some of them on par with Nintendo's offerings at the time. I wanted to do my own fan games, but I wasn't a fan of many of the entry-level engines available at the time; they were very limited in scope. However, one thing was common across 90% of the extremely high-quality games: Game Maker. Got started with Game Maker 5 and the rest is history.
 

Jabbers

Member
Pokemon Blue on my Gameboy Color back in the early 2000s. Being the little weirdo that I was, what excited me about the game was the open world style, the towns, but especially the NPC dialogue. I spent a lot of time drawing out my own Gameboy games with a silly amount of emphasis on dialogue, most of it modelled on Pokemon. I wish I still had the drawings.
 
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Old School Ben

Guest
I have always been obsessed with games. I used to draw Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog levels on graph paper in the 90s. Back in the AOL days I would make my own animations and crappy flash games. I even dabbled with game design with early versions of Game Maker.

I have been extremely inspired by indie games, particularly games made by small teams or a single developer.

I played Cave Story on 3DS and have been super inspired after learning that a single developer made such an engaging game experience.

I also had my mind blown by the puzzle/platformer concepts of Braid.

I still haven't played Undertale but it doesn't seem like the type of game I would enjoy.
 

Roa

Member
I've always wanted to make games. When I was 5-ish, I used to draw these weird underground maze pictures in mspaint and wish that I could turn it into a game.
This^^
TLDR: super metroid.

I grew up on super metroid. My first game I ever played, had to sneak into my brothers room to play it while he was away in highschool. It was also the first game that was MINE when my parents bought my brother and I our own SNES. The atmosphere and idea of crawling through tunnels deeper into and unknown planet broke my brain. I would spend hours drawing caverns on copy-paper and taping them together with puzzles and enemies made of legos. These maps got soo big, I was soon into the hundreds of sheets of paper and there wasn't a single room in the house that could contain this giant posters I made. I had to "load the map" by grabbing one of dozens of these monster posters I made. Im not joking when I say I probably had 8-9 8x14 foot maps drawn at one time. My parents couldn't even get through the house without trampling them.

Started at RPGmaker 2k and found I couldn't make final fantasy and metroid, and so I moved onto game maker.

Ah, I remember my first metroid "game" like it was yesterday. She only moved right, never stopped the running animation, moved upwards at a 4 degree angle and only fired one bullet object hidden under her that I copied all the movement code from samus to get keep it there.
My mind was blown when I finally discovered 2 years later instance_create() was a thing and I could just move and object to another's x/y XD (I got started super young)
Got the game maker's apprentice and that really kicked me off.
 
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LiamCollie

Guest
Old SNES Final Fantasy series. I've been a long time lover of RPGs. And I use to use RPG Maker for game dev. But never did coding. Hence why I got GMS2.
I have to say the one that stands out for gamewise is Final Fantasy III (SNES) aka Final Fantasy VI (PS1). I've always love that style of RPG. Also Stardew Valley a bit.
 
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Carcophan

Guest
Personally - I got laid off of work and got drunk that night. I woke up the next morning with a credit card bill and a brand new license for GMS2 through Steam.

No complaints either way, love not having that job and love learning GML. :p
 
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MikeDark_x

Guest
Well... you see, I really liked alien hominid on the gba... later on I learned that it was originally an indie game...
used to do some crazy powerpoint presentations turned into short stories with a friend in highschool too...

fast forward: I'm here
 

Bluetail7

Member
I always to make my own megaman x game so I stumbled on GM7 but dropped it out of interest. A few years later I got back by the end of GM8 and begining of 8.1.
I got the GM 8 version and spent all of my time trying to understand the state machines. After a while I managed to make something decent, back then I had no idea what were the use of scripts after I moved to GameMaker: Studio.

That's where I rushed my development and made bigger projects, fulfilling the ambitions of my childhood. Plus making my own characters and animations after meeting lots of skilled people.

Overall my programming, writing, drawing and level design are average good, but not the best out there.
 
One of the first PC games I played was Starcraft Brood War. There was a campaign editor so I got into level design a little bit making my own maps. Also in Minecraft I made small adventure maps. (Fun fact of me, many years after starting game dev I actually published this MC map too http://www.minecraftmaps.com/pve-maps/the-gauntlet).

But the main games that inspired me to get into game development was Legend of Zelda, especially Ocarina of Time which I played a lot as a kid. I would make mini Zelda dungeons out of tinker-toys and legos, and add keys and locked doors to the mazes in my coloring books. So in 7th grade there was a game development class (which I didn't actually take till later). But they used Gamemaker (GM 8.1 lite) so it was on the school computers and I thought I'd try it out. First thing I did was make a small LoZ clone.

Today I am working on a full-featured adventure game inspired by Zelda, titled The Last Librarian (see below). So I think the inspiration carried over. The villain is the same villain I used in my first game all those years ago.
 


This E3 demo blew my mind when I was an early teen, old enough to be able to start viewing the world and the universe more widely, but still young enough for games to be truly magical. There was so much about this demo that just shaped my existence, with its art style, the environment design, the colours, the programming, the mysteries down every unexplored road; there's no way I'd ever be able to put it all into words. I literally cried during the relatively recent IGN stream where Frankie brought out an old Xbox unit containing the demo, showcasing this level from all sorts of new angles in order to better visualize the environment design. It truly was awe-inspiring and tear-jerking to finally see more of this level 16 years after the couple feeds released.

I always wanted to make my own FPS as a result of this demo. I initially started with Dark Basic by trying to make what I thought Halo 2 was going to be like. That was a crash and burn as I had no idea where to even begin, besides modelling weapons and environments in Anim8or, a program I still use to this day. I hunted around, researching various engines, but didn't find anything that was simple to learn yet versatile enough to allow me to fulfill my vision until I discovered Game Maker 6.1. I initially started on a Half-Life 2 clone due to various reasons, and by the time I finished the engine (with a mostly-working gravity gun, too), I decided to start my dream project, Let Live.

I have a level in my game that has a segment very similar to this demo as a homage. I wouldn't be who I am without this demo, and I wouldn't be where I am in life without it, either. Thank you for creating this, Bungie, even if it was too much for the Xbox and really should have been a 360 launch title if Microsoft wasn't so focused on using Halo 2 to push Xbox Live. Hopefully my game will take off and my dreams will come true (and that I can buy an Aventador S as a result)
 
Alex Kidd in Miracle World.
My first console and game, my mother actually beat the game first and showed me how to do it too. She would write in the manual hints and secrets and puzzle solutions.
I spent hours and hours reading the manual and I just loved all the illustrations and descriptions. At first I just wanted to do that, make up the stories and characters and make my own game manuals but that eventually turned into wanting to make the games myself(when I eventually learnt that I could do it one day).
 

Ihato

Member
Welcome to the forums! I suggest you start the conversation by sharing your answer to the question first, to get the ball rolling. That is the done thing to do I believe, also recommended by the forum guidelines.
I always viewed posts that welcome new users as while also correcting them as passive-aggressive.
 
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Carcophan

Guest
Wait... does this mean I am an official game developer now??
 

Rob

Member
When I was a kid games like Heroquest were coming out as board games. I was lucky enough to receive a few of them as presents an led the rest... I made my own versions of with cardboard, paper and biros lol.

I also made a few pen and paper RPGs. I'd never actually played any and nobody ever played mine but I had some idea of what to do and I enjoyed the whole process.

Drawing little maps like those you might see in The Hobbit, making up stats and the having test fights were all cool. I just never considered that I could do it as a job, otherwise my early adulthood could have been very different!
 
I always viewed posts that welcome new users as while also correcting them as passive-aggressive.
Good sir, I feel my honour besmirched. Are you calling me passive-agressive perchance? Nay wait, you called my post passive aggressive...isn't that ironic...you are passive-agressively calling me passive aggressive.

No passive-agressiveness was intended, I simply noticed it seemed like it was their first post, a totally separate thing compared to what they were posting about. If they had posted 1000 times, I would still have made the same comment, minus the friendly greeting.
 

Gamebot

Member
Commander Keen, Doom, Wolfenstein 3d, Crystal Caves and that whole era... which is ironic considering I find myself doing more "appy" stuff just to see if I can do it.
I now deal with more of graphing cryptic solutions, choosing and solving them.
 
Excellent topic!

I have to say the one that stands out for gamewise is Final Fantasy III (SNES) aka Final Fantasy VI (PS1).
Right there with you on that one, hence the picture on the left. I don't know if FF VI made me want to make games, but it definitely turned me from a kid that played videogames into a "Gamer." Before that, though, I was drawing new Mega Man levels on notebook paper. I may have actually mailed some to the address on the back of the Mega Man II instruction manual, but I don't remember if that was something I actually did or just something I thought to do but didn't follow through on. As more and more games began to include character creators and level editors, I found myself playing them whether I was otherwise interested in the game or not. It occurred to me one day that if I was willing to pay to make levels in other people's games, I should probably look into game development. Not long after, PC Gamer had an article on free game development tools, and I picked up the trial version of GMS 1. Still drawing levels and characters on notebook paper, but now they end up in an actual game. How damn weird is that?
 

Bearman_18

Fruit Stand Deadbeat
The game that made me want to be a developer had to be Earthbound. After I played that, I would spend days designing RPG's on notebook paper. I spent about a decade lamenting that there was no way for me to actually make games, but I read about Gamemaker in a video game history book, and, after it sat on my PC for a year, finally got around using it.
 
Ever since I was 6 years old, I wanted to make my own Mario levels and would doodle scenes with crayons on paper. Fast forward to 2002 when I was a moderator of a rom hacking forum. There were a few games we hacked just for fun: Mario, Metroid, Megaman, and Castlevania. Sure, we had tools to facilitate our hobbies but that was limited to whatever the tools could do for us. If we wanted to do something drastic like introduce a new enemy or add weather effects, etc, we had to understand ASM. This is a very low-level programming language used in old-school games and required an understanding of how memory addresses and routines worked. Even if you understood how to program in ASM, the process of doing so was VERY tedious, even down to tile editing for graphics. Working with only 13 usable colors per 16 color palette was difficult enough.

I wanted to try making a Mario game and decided to give Game Maker a try. The idea was that nothing was limited to memory addresses or any such nonsense. I wanted to build a game that was open source and easily editable by anyone wanting to make their own Mario game. My first attempt was terrible of course and I relied on drag-and-drop functions. There were countless limitations to resources back then but I continued trying. Although my dream of building a Mario game never came true, I sought out other pursuits. Over the years I've drastically improved and it wasn't until about 2009 that I got serious about programming in general. I enrolled in programming classes, aced them all, and eventually got a job as a software developer. My hobby became my passion, and my passion became my career. It saved me from the hell of being stuck in a cubicle for 8-hours taking internet tech-support calls.

Now I use all core programming concepts I've learned from college AND my job to develop my current project. I am always trying to find new ways to improve my programming skills and I will NEVER STOP. I feel like I've found my purpose. Programming makes me happy and I know I'll be doing this for the rest of my life. And it all started with the iconic little plumber I've known my entire life that inspired me to develop my own video games.
 
Pokemon Yellow was the first game to really get me into video games. I would say Cave Story and Spelunky inspired me to someday want to make games and then I would play any game with an editor especially Warioware D.I.Y. constantly.

My style I have used in the games I have made is inspired from famicom games I played on one of those 200 in 1 bootleg game systems. Specifically Wan Wan Panic (Chubby Cherub in the USA), Ninja-kid, and Ninja Hattori-kun. I loved how colorful, expressive, and charming those game worlds were even if the games weren't that great. Its weird how so few made it to the US on the NES.
 
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Deleted member 13992

Guest
Mario Land 3, Metroid II and Zelda Links Awakening probably pushed me into the gamedev career path I've been in for 18 years.


And The Swapper made me look into gamedev as personal side-projects.
 
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