How/Why did you start coding?

[Xaos]

How, and why, did you start coding? I started because I wanted to make a game, and MikeD (I knew him from another sports game) referred me to hall's tuts, and it went from there What about y'all?

[Jackolantern]

(Wow, sorry, this kind of became a little book before I even realized it. TL/DR: I started around '94 in a basic class in public school, and then built out from there)

I got started in 5th grade when I took a very general "Computers" class. This probably would have been about 1994 or so. They first taught typing, then what each of the components were (on an Apple IIe, mind you, which even at that time was about 8 years obsolete lol), and then finally, at the very end we got these packets of Apple BASIC code that we simply typed in to make a simple racing game. No instruction at all about what we were actually entering was given, but I was very interested, as was my best friend, John. Ever since I started playing NES around 1988, I had been dreaming of being able to design my own games, but I had always pictured something much more drag-and-drop, kind of like Construct 2 or Stencyl is today (ahead of my time, right?). But now, this brief and very crappy class had shown me how to create an actual, real game.

A month or two later, his dad found his old Apple IIe computer that he had to get for work years before in the attic when he heard us talking about the class. He set it up for us, and we started poking around on it, pretty much figuring it out ourselves by slow trial-and-error (for all intents and purposes, this was before the Web, and we didn't have access to it anyway). We made some text games on it and some goofy stuff. We made about as complex of games as you could make for only knowing IF/ELSE, FOR, WHILE and PRINT.

The next year we got a state-of-the-art Packard Bell 486dx 75mHz with 4 megs of RAM. I found QBASIC on it, and picked right back up where I left off on the Apple IIe. By this time my friend had kind of dropped out of it, and it was just me, alone in the guest room hacking away on much more complex text games, some of which even used real-time gameplay mechanics, or interacted with the time of day. Then a neighbor down the street gave me a stack of bootleg floppy discs with Visual Basic 4.0 on it. I started making much more complex games, since I could now easily add graphics from Windows (QBASIC was a DOS program, and for the life of me I could never figure out how to insert images into your program).

I kind of slacked off for a bit, but then Everquest in 1999 again completely reinvigorated me again to pick up game development, and I discovered DarkBASIC. From there then I found Realm Crafter, couldn't wait on that any longer and moved to .NET, then Java, then PHP, and now to HTML5/Node.js development. And here we are today

[Xaos]

Aha, it was long, but I enjoyed the story

[Callan S.]

(QBASIC was a DOS program, and for the life of me I could never figure out how to insert images into your program)

Aww man, I know that feeling!

I actually wrote a program that would take images on the screen and convert them to a string that the draw function could use. Then you could load them and use another function to record them off the screen once drawn. Cept you had to show all your graphics to everyone, that way, which sucked!

Battled with that code!

I think the problem though has always been as one grew older, ones expectations grew, but ones capacities lagged behind. I could make games that'd dazzle my 12 year old self. Do I? No because I'm so focused on fiddley extra stuff games...

[Jackolantern]

I think the problem though has always been as one grew older, ones expectations grew, but ones capacities lagged behind. I could make games that'd dazzle my 12 year old self. Do I? No because I'm so focused on fiddley extra stuff games...

I hear that! I also am really envious of how focused I would be back then. I would just sit for 6 hours straight every day just coding non-stop until my game was done, no matter how many days, weeks or months it took. I had a pile of about 10 text-based RPGs of increasing complexity within a year, with the last one having about 1000 hours of work in it, and it was basically like a real-time single-player MUD. The game world wouldn't wait for you to make decisions like with all my previous text-based RPGs. Enemies would attack, the time of day would change and NPCs would move around. And I made it in little crappy QBASIC with nothing but the in-program help files lol. I am still proud of that, even if the program is long, long gone.

Aha, it was long, but I enjoyed the story

Thank you!

[Callan S.]

even if the program is long, long gone.

Aww! That's sad!

There's probably a lesson here - if you have photo albums, you should print out your code and have code albums. That way if you can't run the game, you can still look at it and see it in your minds eye from the code.

[Jackolantern]

Haha! That is a good idea!

If I remember right, I had them for a while on floppy disks, but eventually they just got misplaced, and since QBASIC wouldn't work after a few more versions of Windows, it didn't feel like a huge loss at the time

[OldRod]

Fall of 1978, started college... never seen a computer before in my life. Met a guy in the dorm who was into Dungeons and Dragons and he was writing a program to calculate how much experience you got for killing something in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign he was working on, (the amount was based on a *lot* of factors). He was writing it in Fortran... on punch cards, no less. He and I started working on it together and I got hooked. We had it working pretty well, then the guys in the IT department thought it would be fun to shuffle our cards

Before long the Atari 400 computer was released. It hooked to the TV, had a cassette tape drive for storage and a whopping 16MB of RAM. I subscribed to a magazine that taught how to program it and started tinkering with little games here and there. And to this day I have yet to finish any game I've ever started writing

I did, however, write a program to track Bingo cards. A local radio station gave out bingo cards and every day at a certain time they would play it on the air. First person to call in with a winning card would win $25 or something. I had 8 cards and had trouble keeping up with them reading the numbers, so I wrote a program that displayed all 8 cards on the screen and would 'X' out numbers as I input them. I actually won twice using this

[vitinho444]

I started thanks to halls!!!

With 12 years i played games like Ogame, Tribal Wars, some Mafia games too, those browser based games that were and still are main stream.
I decided i wanted to build one And i found halls tutorials, followed like 10 maybe, and then downloaded the source code, it contained some errors that i fixed alone and i felt really proud of it, played with the source code for a while, builded some games from it but nothing official. From there it was ON!!

[Jackolantern]

Before long the Atari 400 computer was released. It hooked to the TV, had a cassette tape drive for storage and a whopping 16MB of RAM.

Nice story! I thought I started on a pretty early computer, but I am beat hehe! But...I do believe you mean "16kb" of RAM. 16MB cost about $50,000 back then