Shorty wanna be a gamedev
So here's my story. Back in 2007/08 I was a 15-year-old kid slacking my way through the last school grade, preparing to apply to the university (which meant doing a huge pile of nothing and playing tons of games). It happened around Christmas. The autumn semester had just ended, I was fully prepared to be bored for the next half a month. All of a sudden our CS teacher called me and one my classmates (also a close friend) and told there'd be a youth conference of something district-wide held in our school on Jan, 20th. "You are pretty good at coding", he says, "so don't let the school down. We have high expectations".
Our first reaction was a huge WAT. One thing is to know Delphi good enough to find CS classes easy and boring. Scaring girls with "insane superpower" which is forcing the 3.5" make its sound with the power of our minds is slightly different, but still easy. To build something serious enough to bring to the conference... well, that was definitely from another league. We didn't have even a vague idea about what to do, so we expanded our group to 4 BFFs, and one of them (pretty bad at coding, but a great enthusiast) lightly said:
-- We should just do the type of software that we enjoy most.
That surely meant a videogame.
We laughed the pink off his butt. He was serious, though. The clock was ticking, so we got to our work.
We didn't know how were we going to accomplish this. We didn't know what type of game to write. We didn't know anything.
Google knew.
The mighty search engine wisely councelled us to make an arcade. A simple space arcade could be made flashy enough to look like alright to the jury. We just weren't sure if it'd be enough. One of us had so much doubts that he refused to make the arcade.
This was it. The initial team proceeded to coding the arcade, one guy grinded his teeth working on a strategy, and that enthusiast provided us with sprites, backgrounds, sounds and whatnot. Time passed by, we were reading forums and stuff, slowly learning how objects work, what is a method and such. Frankly, the more we read, the more the despair grew. Four weeks is surely not enough time to understand programming from nearly zero basis.
Finally it was 18th and I came to my friend's place to announce we are in over our damn heads. We had some basic routines coded, like creating sprites, moving them, destroing and checking collisions. Everything was buggy, though, and we still had no idea how to reliably create one sprite at a fixed distance from another, i.e. make spaceships shoot. The deadline was 60 hours away, our creation was a total disaster. Luckily, my friend's family was away for some days, so we packed the place with beer, waffles and enough coffee to keep us awake for a couple of nights. What do you think? By 9:00 AM of Jan 20th we had a perfect arcade with some nice additional features (turrets, unexpectedly good AI and stuff) and a strategy that worked all right, but sooner or later tried to divide by zero. We never found out why.
So we went to school, falling asleep as we walked, expecting to be laughed at and take the last place in the competition, right?
Oh were we wrong, boy.
It was a total joke of a conference. Some projects were clearly just presented by poor kids, other were HEY I'VE JUST DISCOVERED VISUAL BASIC level. Seemed like only our team went serious about the task. Surely we took the first place!
The team was up for the city conference. I soon broke two ribs, though, and was out of the loop. Meanwhile, the guys decided to throw away the games rather than polish them. They wanted to go big. They wanted to go 3D. Of course, nobody realized that the geometry would be like ten times more complex. Maybe I had a chance to nail it down, sicne I've studied linear algebra for fun that time, but I was completely cut off the outer world in the hospital. Anyway, my buddies failed miserably and none of us ever tried to make games again.
And here I am five years later, soon reciecing a Specialist degree (rougly equal to Master's) in plasma physics, thinking to myself: "Hey dawg, now that you seem not to be broke the next few years, why don't you return to the roots, study C++, software engineering and learn the basics of OpenGL, for example?" And I will.
Although I have no idea what to start with. I know this forum is no place for this, but if somebody could point me in the right direction, I'd be happy.
I sure hope to work for the industry someday.
(EDIT: sorry for poor grammar)
This thread is dedicated to all our shameful, failed, hilarious, etc. experiences in making games.
Don't be shy, just share!
Don't be shy, just share!
So here's my story. Back in 2007/08 I was a 15-year-old kid slacking my way through the last school grade, preparing to apply to the university (which meant doing a huge pile of nothing and playing tons of games). It happened around Christmas. The autumn semester had just ended, I was fully prepared to be bored for the next half a month. All of a sudden our CS teacher called me and one my classmates (also a close friend) and told there'd be a youth conference of something district-wide held in our school on Jan, 20th. "You are pretty good at coding", he says, "so don't let the school down. We have high expectations".
Our first reaction was a huge WAT. One thing is to know Delphi good enough to find CS classes easy and boring. Scaring girls with "insane superpower" which is forcing the 3.5" make its sound with the power of our minds is slightly different, but still easy. To build something serious enough to bring to the conference... well, that was definitely from another league. We didn't have even a vague idea about what to do, so we expanded our group to 4 BFFs, and one of them (pretty bad at coding, but a great enthusiast) lightly said:
-- We should just do the type of software that we enjoy most.
That surely meant a videogame.
We laughed the pink off his butt. He was serious, though. The clock was ticking, so we got to our work.
We didn't know how were we going to accomplish this. We didn't know what type of game to write. We didn't know anything.
Google knew.
The mighty search engine wisely councelled us to make an arcade. A simple space arcade could be made flashy enough to look like alright to the jury. We just weren't sure if it'd be enough. One of us had so much doubts that he refused to make the arcade.
This was it. The initial team proceeded to coding the arcade, one guy grinded his teeth working on a strategy, and that enthusiast provided us with sprites, backgrounds, sounds and whatnot. Time passed by, we were reading forums and stuff, slowly learning how objects work, what is a method and such. Frankly, the more we read, the more the despair grew. Four weeks is surely not enough time to understand programming from nearly zero basis.
Finally it was 18th and I came to my friend's place to announce we are in over our damn heads. We had some basic routines coded, like creating sprites, moving them, destroing and checking collisions. Everything was buggy, though, and we still had no idea how to reliably create one sprite at a fixed distance from another, i.e. make spaceships shoot. The deadline was 60 hours away, our creation was a total disaster. Luckily, my friend's family was away for some days, so we packed the place with beer, waffles and enough coffee to keep us awake for a couple of nights. What do you think? By 9:00 AM of Jan 20th we had a perfect arcade with some nice additional features (turrets, unexpectedly good AI and stuff) and a strategy that worked all right, but sooner or later tried to divide by zero. We never found out why.
So we went to school, falling asleep as we walked, expecting to be laughed at and take the last place in the competition, right?
Oh were we wrong, boy.
It was a total joke of a conference. Some projects were clearly just presented by poor kids, other were HEY I'VE JUST DISCOVERED VISUAL BASIC level. Seemed like only our team went serious about the task. Surely we took the first place!
The team was up for the city conference. I soon broke two ribs, though, and was out of the loop. Meanwhile, the guys decided to throw away the games rather than polish them. They wanted to go big. They wanted to go 3D. Of course, nobody realized that the geometry would be like ten times more complex. Maybe I had a chance to nail it down, sicne I've studied linear algebra for fun that time, but I was completely cut off the outer world in the hospital. Anyway, my buddies failed miserably and none of us ever tried to make games again.
And here I am five years later, soon reciecing a Specialist degree (rougly equal to Master's) in plasma physics, thinking to myself: "Hey dawg, now that you seem not to be broke the next few years, why don't you return to the roots, study C++, software engineering and learn the basics of OpenGL, for example?" And I will.
Although I have no idea what to start with. I know this forum is no place for this, but if somebody could point me in the right direction, I'd be happy.
I sure hope to work for the industry someday.
(EDIT: sorry for poor grammar)