At 12/23/23 12:12 AM, MomentumBaker wrote:

At 12/8/23 04:41 PM, EmsDeLaRoZ wrote: I made my first game in Scratch, and consisted of scratch cat jumping cars that were passing by. It was more of a experiment thing, but that was it.

I've learned so much about programming and gamedev that at this point, I can make complex games in either C++ or JS, but since i'm currently full of work rn, those plans are to be left for another moment

It's pretty wild finding my terrible scratch projects from like 2007. I really wanted to make "Runescape but in modern times and also you can own your own land and start a family." when I was 12. Surprisingly I didn't achieve that in Scratch.

At 12/15/23 08:28 AM, zeddy1267 wrote: This is going to be a long read, as I cover most major hurdles with my game.

My first game is conveniently on this site, Viva Hexagon! Feat. Ipulo. Technically, this is just the demo version, and not the full game, but it has all of the basics. It mainly just lacks any singleplayer goals, so there's no real content aside from the leaderboards.

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/897374

It's a board-based puzzle vs. game operating on a hexagonal grid. You control a 2d platforming character on the board to pick up and move around the hexagonal cells. The goal of the game is to create matches in a way that pieces fall and make chains, which in turn screws over the opponent to make them lose.

You can watch the trailer on YouTube here.

There's also a 2nd major gamemode where you and the other player share one big board, and have to try and kill each other, either by kicking your opponent, or making chains and matches to reduce their HP. It's kind of like budget Smash Bros. where you are also playing on a Tetris board.

This game was a stupidly complex concept for a first game. There were multiple hurdles that I'm surprised I pulled off for my first project.

Firstly, I had to make a way to store the hexagonal grid in a way which worked with gravity (the pieces have gravity). This means that the typical hex-coord system that people use doesn't work, so I had to come up with a solution on my own.

Second major hurdle was figuring out how to move the pieces. Hexagonal grids don't have cardinal axis, which is where the idea for a platforming character came in. You may not be able to intuitively move hexagons with the d-pad, but controlling a 2d character with a d-pad is one of the easiest things to do. This means I also design this game as a platformer with decent movement.

The platforming part is neat. Since the board is made up of hexagonal cells, it can form very interesting to navigate terrain. The game isn't ONLY about scoring points. You also have to keep your board organized so you can move the character around it, which is neat!

The third big thing is that the pieces you pick up may contain many hexagonal cells, making them large and awkward to move around. The character has free movement around the board, but the hexagons are locked to the grid. I had to make a system to try and intelligently figure out the most "natural" position to place the piece. This is the most important piece of the game, since it makes the game go from unplayably clunky, to relatively smooth and intuitive.

A player won't notice this system, since it's doing it's job properly. Think of it like driving an automatic vs. a manual. The automatic does all the work for you, so you don't even think about it, unless you know what it'd be like without it. That's why I mention it, because it's a complex system that I'll never get any acknowledgement for.

The final major aspect of my game is the A.I. opponent. Everything I mentioned before built up to this, as the AI has to take all of that into account. This includes:

Individually, those points are all complex. However, those points also affect each other, which means the AI has to take the whole picture into account.

For example, when the A.I. picks up and places pieces, it changes the shape of the board. The shape of the board can also change if other pieces fall and land. This means the A.I. has to strategize both around scoring points, but also keeping the board manageable for itself.

The whole field is dynamic, so the AI has to be able to have a plan in mind, but be able to improvise as well in case something stops it.

I've actually considered making a video going into detail about how the AI works, just because it's probably my favorite part of the game. Most of my time developing Viva Hexagon! was actually just watching the AI play against itself. Seeing my code bring the AI player to life was really charming to me.

Unfortunately, the majority of players who played my game only played "solo" mode, which lacks the AI entirely, as well as most of the game's features.

Seeing players either give up on the tutorial (which is my own fault), or only playing "solo" mode is really heartbreaking. All of the effort put into my game was for the versus mode and battle mode, which is fighting the A.I. player. This is extra annoying because I've gotten very little useful feedback for my game, since most people haven't even played the main part of the game.

FuturecopLGF made a video reviewing the best games of September 2023 on Newgrounds, including my game, and unfortunately he also only played the tutorial and solo mode, which is unfortunate because his feedback is typically great, and he completely missed the most cool parts of the game!

One last struggle I had was that I've never animated before, and I wanted to give the characters relatively smooth animations. I'm never really a fan of when art styles visibly look limiting, such as pixel art, or just low framerate in general. I understand why those art styles are prominent, since it's easy, but I wanted to go above and beyond for my first game. You'd never catch me making a pixel art game >:(

I'm also a little frustrated my game only lasted 4 days on the front page, while most last several weeks. But oh well, that's just be being whiny!

At 12/14/23 11:32 AM, CrosEl wrote:

At 12/7/23 11:25 AM, JensVide wrote:

The very first (if I remember right) was a game called "Saga"
it was on Gamemaker studio, as the 1st version was free due to
the updates the full thing got.

It had strict limitations though; 20(?) Sprites, 15 objects, 4 sounds (including fx and music), 5 rooms, 5 backgrounds(?) and MANY timers... There was a little more, but I can't remember all of it..

Thing was: I didn't know any programming language, but GM allowed game making to happen easily due to preset commands that can be tweaked. Unfortunately I jumped in without really understanding anything that was there, nor knowing the importance of saving space. So, I had made this huge maze thing.. Wait, take a step back; I couldn't understand the sprite maker, so I downloaded many "placeholder" sprites to get going. So if I remember right... Some of the sprites were:

Pokemon trainer from GEN1
trees from 4 swords adventure
Metroid
Ridley
Ki blast
Frieza in his first form

And as for backgrounds; real life pictures of grass and dirt😂
There were more and I still don't know why I used photos
instead of tiles...

The rest of this gets a little too detailed, um:
The game was about finding the boss of each maze and killing him to move on to the next. The amount of objects allowed didn't let me graphically customize each area though , so every area was way too big AND looked too similar to each other. Or if the game was confused, it would be very glitches looking....

Controlwise: I couldn't understand how to make moving the player move normally. So when you go in any direction, you continue in that direction until you hit a tree or change to another.

Another thing was I didn't know how to make energy be a thing, so I needed someway to make it possible to lose the game/have a challenge. Thus the timers were used, I just gave it a very long time to let the player traverse the huge maze, then reset it when they move to another area. But running into a Metroid or Frieza will screw with your movement, and thus waste time. They moved in simple patterns so you had to time your movements to get by them, or be knocked into a tree and get stuck. Ridley would also reset your progress to the start of the maze, so you have to find a safe place to attack from (of course). When you ran out of time: you'd starve, and the game would reset from the start--the first level.

I don't remember if I made it clear the character was supposed to hurry or they'd starve... But that was how it worked; to save the world, you'd need to finish the maze before you go hungry (to be honest ...... I honestly can't remember much about the first two levels and only that I tried using enemy cues to let the trees know to change into blocks(?) To try making the environment look different, but it probably didn't work at all) There was only 3 mazes too, because the first room was used as the start screen and the last was used as the "CONGRATULATIONS" the end screen.

Being somewhat (?) Smarter now, I know I could've shrunk down the objects and made a much more bigger game with the little I had... and there were ways to tell the trees and other objects to update according to the area the player was in, but ...ahhhhh....

There's no way I could show anyone how saga looked (unless I remade it, lol😂) it was probably destroyed in the SD card, as it got corrupted...

BONUS!
Last but not least: this was all done on a tablet. Making Saga, and all games made after it Miracles, apparently. Because I bought another device recently with better specs than the tablet I used before, for the sole purpose of redownloading the same version of game maker again (For multiple reasons, the biggest ones being I don't get programming languages and couldn't afford a extremely expensive laptop pc anyway, that could use the latest version: Game maker2) . So I found a site that archives old downloads and got ready to use it again, but it wouldn't work... So I made a Yoyo games account and asked what was going on with the thing, and was told that GM never worked on tablets of any kind and was always and only meant to be on pc..and that anything I did was a fluke.

I look at every game made on that tablet with Game maker as a miracle (regardless of the varying quality) because of this information..

At 12/14/23 07:28 AM, NukeThemAllGame wrote: I'm making my first game called Nuke Them all, it's a fun real time strategy game. I am a solo developer so keeping motivation going is the toughest part and learning to outsource and learn from others!

Making the game alone is tough.. It's a long journey but totally worth it!

At 12/13/23 07:45 PM, darkmuffan wrote: This was my first game I built using GameMaker2. It was a simple platformer for a gamejam at the time, but it was very buggy. Definitely need more work done to be playable. Right now I'm building stuff with RPGMaker MV and I'll be expanding my game stuff to building my RPG.

At 12/13/23 09:21 AM, BobbyBurt wrote: I’ll say City Escape is my first game, but it’s really my first significant game. Technically, it’s this one. When I started with Unity, I’d follow tutorials to the end, then use what I learnt to add to the game and make it my own. That’s all City Escape really is. Not a bad way to learn.

Back then I’d only post to itch.io, where the games got no traction. As a joke I’d set the games’ category to “hentai”, but found that it actually worked in getting people to see the game.

At 12/12/23 08:44 PM, RodDeLaPan wrote: I was like 12 I think, used gamemaker 8 because it had visual programming. It was like a platformer without gravity (because i didn't know how to do that lol) and the final boss was my cousin's face ripped from his facebook profile, then i drew a knife on it with paint and made it bounce around the room. The HHD of that PC died long ago fortunately.

At 12/11/23 07:16 AM, Chdonga wrote:

At 12/11/23 05:35 AM, JensVide wrote:

At 12/10/23 04:47 PM, Chdonga wrote: I can't remember which one was the first
-I made like an RPG Maker XP open world adventure with default assets
-There was this Mario fangame engine called the Hello Engine that I tore apart to make a Mario themed Ice Climbers ripoff

I think the Clock Crew Quickdraw game I made a few years ago was my first complete game. I made some stuff in RPG Maker MV but I couldn't get it to run on NG so I just raged and pitched it.

Now that you mention RPG maker, the first time I somewhat seriously tried to make a game was probably with RPG maker(I got bored).

Yeah RPG Maker has a spot in my heart. Every once in a while I consider just making something for shits & giggles. Somebody even made an HTML5 wrapper for RPG Maker 2000/2k3 games so you could upload it to NG. Maybe someday I'll whip something up in it just to say that I did.

At 12/10/23 11:08 PM, EnergyDrinkClock wrote: I made this game:

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/816087

A remake of the Xgenstudios game, Fishy Classic.

For some reason, I had difficulty in getting the Newgrounds rewards API working. It worked part of the time, and didn't work other times.

At 12/10/23 10:48 PM, ErasmusMagnus wrote:

At 12/10/23 04:18 PM, JensVide wrote: Honestly it sounds like the review got to you but hey I'd still love to see some visuals of the game if you want to put them up.

Hah fuck no it got to me. I had a laugh. Of course it was terrible. It was never meant to be good, it was the published result of me dicking around. It's stupid because this is the equivalent of Roger Ebert criticizing your homemade movie.

It's like, no shit Sherlock, who would've guessed some guy not even trying, messing around without a care in the world because it was for fun, wouldn't be good or fun or original? Why would anybody on earth waste their time by seriously reviewing this? Are you kidding me? What were you hoping to get out of fruitlessly punching down? As if I would come back 10 years later and improve upon something which from the start was a ripoff with no potential, except in seeing how dumb it could escalate. What's next, lambasting my kindergarten art homework? I never even wanted my game on your shitty site. Even I have standards. So sure, I'll take your review into very serious consideration next time I make a ripoff game in another 10 years, buddy.

Hey, at least I got the ouch face working, so that's one point to me over id.

Others include:

Another Doom ripoff, but earnestly better

A top down shooter I was quite proud of. Like the above game, for this I actually designed the levels myself. They weren't fun, but they were varied. And the finale even included a tank! Yes, I was inspired by Goldeneye. Might be my best game of old. And hey, it's in widescreen!

No points if you guess what this was inspired by. And by that I mean it's another reskinned tutorial. I guess that Softpedia reviewer wouldn't rate it high.

Another reskinned tutorial

Point n click ripoff. At least the programming was technically original. I believe this was my first finished game. If I jumped back into making them again, I would definitely start with point and click, because they're simple to program, and I love mysterious stories, cerebral puzzle solving, and I love the genre.

A ripoff of somebody's game. I remember they were flattered. It was cathartic fun, but totally broken. Your cash could go into the negative.

Shoutout to that Norwegian kid who used Game Maker to make a prototype platformer where you could jump infinitely because he figured out how to program gravity, but not a way to limit jumping only once. Or on the ground. Without you, I never would've known or been inspired to make video games. Making is more important than anything and I have nothing but fond memories making these charming pieces of garbage. Everybody's got to start somewhere, and I think I did alright. Hopefully here's to many more, MUCH BETTER, and original games.

At 12/10/23 07:29 PM, infrawash wrote: oh man, if i remember when i made my first game, it was this

it's called plataformer (yeah, it's the name of the game)

made in 2017, i was just testing gamemaker using the dnd (drag and draw) method, and well, looks like shit, but i even still like it, cuz i remember that took me a loot of days learning about programing for making these, worth it? yes, (im not in game dev anymore, yet)

At 12/10/23 04:47 PM, Chdonga wrote: I can't remember which one was the first
-I made like an RPG Maker XP open world adventure with default assets
-There was this Mario fangame engine called the Hello Engine that I tore apart to make a Mario themed Ice Climbers ripoff

I think the Clock Crew Quickdraw game I made a few years ago was my first complete game. I made some stuff in RPG Maker MV but I couldn't get it to run on NG so I just raged and pitched it.

At 12/10/23 04:35 PM, JASONBANIMATIONS wrote:

At 12/10/23 04:28 PM, JensVide wrote:

At 12/10/23 02:40 PM, JASONBANIMATIONS wrote:

At 12/7/23 11:25 AM, JensVide wrote: If you make games, I would love to hear about your first game. Could you tell me what kind of game it was? How did you make it? If it is publically available, feel free to link it.

I have started making games myself and I would love to get inspiration from the others' experiences.

My first game was pretty much a horror game with Stickman and whatnot
It doesn’t really exist anymore though

Ah, unfortunate.

Not really, the game was horrible looking.
Like it gets to the point where it was worser then a crude mspaint drawing kinda bad

At 12/10/23 02:40 PM, JASONBANIMATIONS wrote:

At 12/7/23 11:25 AM, JensVide wrote: If you make games, I would love to hear about your first game. Could you tell me what kind of game it was? How did you make it? If it is publically available, feel free to link it.

I have started making games myself and I would love to get inspiration from the others' experiences.

My first game was pretty much a horror game with Stickman and whatnot
It doesn’t really exist anymore though

At 12/10/23 02:18 PM, Scootakip wrote: I have no way of knowing what my first ever game was as I made so, so many of them as a kid using various different tools such as Scratch and Roblox.

My first ever game on Newgrounds, however, is Egg-Legs
My friend and I made this game in a week for a game jam and it really shows.
It was pretty clear that I was learning (and not fully understanding) a lot of new stuff in the Godot engine while making it. Most of the minigames are pretty poorly designed ideas that weren't completely thought through.
The game had basically no file compression causing it to take way too long to load in browsers.
The difficulty was too bullshit for the judges to beat it when they livestreamed all of the games in the jam, and when we gave them a debug code to help them get to the last minigame it completely bugged out and was unplayable.
I think the only positive of the game that people found was the personality and voice lines of the antagonistic, although this was also another negative for some players.

The game turned out to be a disaster, but the development of it and the feedback from players was a great learning experience that helped me in making other games moving forward.

At 12/10/23 01:23 PM, EmsDeLaRoZ wrote:

At 12/8/23 07:21 PM, Laserr wrote: i'm gamedev beginner, i'm same from your situation...but i'll really like it making games soon!-
some tips i'll give you, for me and maybe for everybody, it could be some helpful:

These sound like good advice, but I want to add some more for every novice:

Either a language or a game engine, they always have a documentation which shows how everything works and how it should be used. I'm recommending this mainly because most beginners in creating gamings just stick to what a Youtube tutorial shows them, and later don't have the capacity to resolve problems by their own knowledge. You can use a yt tutorial to learn how to make a specific game, but in the way, question everything and search for words and objects you don't understand

Programming relies on maths in many ways, and so do the videogames, not only technically, but also playfully speaking. Most game engines already do the complex math for things like poligonal collisions, forces like gravity or acceleration, physics and many other things, but there are certain elements one must program to achieve what they want, and some of these include math (specially when more complex are the mecanics you want to introduce)

We all want to do big things, specially with things that we love. But sometimes, you gotta be real: if you're too small, either in capacity or knowledge to make a big building, you don't do a big building, instead, you do a small one so you learn things, can experiment easier, and make future works smoother in their development

At 12/10/23 11:30 AM, ErasmusMagnus wrote: Years ago I made some games in Game Maker. They were functional and weren't atrocious (not great either), but they were usually ripoffs of existing games, Flash or otherwise. Point and click adventure, top down shooter, various arcade stuff, what we'd now call shitposts, etc. A couple of them were reskinned tutorial games! Lots of stolen assets used too, including plenty from Doom. For some unspeakable, godforsaken reason, some of my shit games made it onto websites like Softpedia, I think some Czech one, and a Japanese site. Yeah, I guess they were released for free, so if you were an asshole, you could call them freeware, though I never gave permission to spread them around and who knows how many copyright laws they violated. But, fuck it, they're free, right? But my mind is boggled because why the hell would ANYBODY deliberately archive these unless they were just scooping up freeware games like Pokemon for their giant Software websites.

But that's not the most outrageous thing. The descriptions people had to come up with because they had to look in the deep recesses of the games were very entertaining, especially when in foreign languages I had to translate. But absolutely best of all, on Softpedia, one of my games got sternly reviewed by a professional. REVIEWED. This bullshit poorly reskinned game that I put like 5 minutes of effort into for sprite changes. A REVIEW WITH HEADINGS. AND LIKE 500 WORDS. This guy is no slouch, he's a bonafide professional reviewer. Who the fuck puts this much effort into what should never have been uploaded to your shitty site in the first place?! Are you kidding me? He gave it one star, but his sarcasm, condescending attitude and reading way, way too deeply into this makes it a 4/5 star review for me. Not 5 because he wasted his fucking time, but 4 because I got a chuckle for him wasting his time on something I was gobsmacked wasn't left to languish. It's true folks. If it's on the internet, it's there forever.

I'd love to share them, but I put some personal information in these games, so that's not happening unless I can hard edit them out with like a hex editor or something. You weren't missing much. Maybe I'll put some screenshots or gameplay up some time.

Now that Game Maker is free for freeware, I'd love to jump back into it and make something that's... not shit. You know, fun. And INSPIRED. And original.

At 12/9/23 11:30 AM, EmsDeLaRoZ wrote:

At 12/9/23 11:27 AM, JensVide wrote:

At 12/9/23 11:18 AM, EmsDeLaRoZ wrote:

At 12/9/23 11:15 AM, JensVide wrote:

At 12/8/23 04:41 PM, EmsDeLaRoZ wrote: I made my first game in Scratch, and consisted of scratch cat jumping cars that were passing by. It was more of a experiment thing, but that was it.

I've learned so much about programming and gamedev that at this point, I can make complex games in either C++ or JS, but since i'm currently full of work rn, those plans are to be left for another moment

Oh, so you've only made games without using a game engine? That's probably unique nowadays where most people start making games in a game engine and learn programming from using the game engine.

I did use unity at some point. But everything was pure experimentation, since I really don't feel comfy working with it. I prefer to do everything my way, even if that implies I have to program physics from zero (whenever I need them of course)

I've met others who like to program everything from scratch, too. I wonder if that has to do with wanting to do everything yourself or simply a mismatch with the game engine. I think it is a bit like Digital Audio Workstations when creating music. I like using FL Studio but Ableton Live makes me miserable, despite both being software geared towards music production.

It depends mostly how you like to work the most. In my case, I like to work at close curtain, and I like a lot doing math and experimentations, which I cannot do in an game engine because almost everything is already added. In my case, is more the fun of programming maths behind a game than doing the game itself

At 12/9/23 11:18 AM, EmsDeLaRoZ wrote:

At 12/9/23 11:15 AM, JensVide wrote:

At 12/8/23 04:41 PM, EmsDeLaRoZ wrote: I made my first game in Scratch, and consisted of scratch cat jumping cars that were passing by. It was more of a experiment thing, but that was it.

I've learned so much about programming and gamedev that at this point, I can make complex games in either C++ or JS, but since i'm currently full of work rn, those plans are to be left for another moment

Oh, so you've only made games without using a game engine? That's probably unique nowadays where most people start making games in a game engine and learn programming from using the game engine.

I did use unity at some point. But everything was pure experimentation, since I really don't feel comfy working with it. I prefer to do everything my way, even if that implies I have to program physics from zero (whenever I need them of course)

At 12/8/23 04:41 PM, EmsDeLaRoZ wrote: I made my first game in Scratch, and consisted of scratch cat jumping cars that were passing by. It was more of a experiment thing, but that was it.

I've learned so much about programming and gamedev that at this point, I can make complex games in either C++ or JS, but since i'm currently full of work rn, those plans are to be left for another moment

At 10/31/23 10:48 AM, KarloGames wrote:

At 10/31/23 10:47 AM, KarloGames wrote:

At 8/22/23 03:28 PM, JensVide wrote:

At 8/14/23 06:07 PM, KarloGames wrote: Hello, I'm working on a new rhythm game named "Jammer Dash". I just finished some base gameplay, and I think I'm ready to look for music. I don't know where to start, so I logged on here and created this post. If you want to add some music in my game, reply below :D

I might be interested, can you show some of the game?

Yup, I can send you some footage through e-mail. What's your mail?

Sorry for the late reply by the way, I was very busy with the game

At 8/26/23 12:33 PM, JensVide wrote: We're making a small free game to publish on Newgrounds and itch. We need a programmer to code the game and bring the ideas into form. More info: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mJz9fR8VpQf8ovAuoYyXK7bEU4_nMJnq-N2u0L6NskI/edit?usp=sharing

If interested, DM me here or on Discord at jens777.
Thanks.