games you made as kids

King of Posters
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feeling mildly insane because sitting on the end table by the couch was a first draft from the card game i made when i was like 7 or 8, which i assumed had long since turned to dust

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i remember enough to know that “hidra” is a misspelling but i’m curious if “beaty” is because that name inadvertantly owns

this game based on my half-understanding of whichever yugioh episodes i managed to catch on 4kids got weirdly popular at my elementary school. i gave my self-insert the highest attack power because i was very cool. i made each copy by hand and had no standard card size, so shuffling your ~10 card deck became sort of an abstract concept

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I wish I had all the klik n play and games factory stuff I made as a kid. I made so many weird little things that were influenced by a combination of Nintendo and vaguely understood screenshots of British computer games.

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my first and only published video game was called REDACTED and i uploaded it to yoyogames sandbox when i was 13, you ran from an ice cream truck while trying to dodge ice cream cones coming at you from various angles and you were scored on time

unfinished/unpublished projects as a teenager:

  • a simultaneous multiplayer tower defense (?) game. on each side of the screen were five walls, and each player would spend credits to place turrets and walls on their side, which each round would simultaneously shoot across at whatever’s in front. the goal of the game was to destroy all five of your opponent’s walls, and there wasn’t much strategy to placing shit.

  • a low-res sandbox game called FOMFOMO where you could left click to create a tiny stick figure (like 10x10 pixels) and right click to kill it. they’d run around do nothing. that was it lol no gameplay

  • simplistic black and white platformer/shooter which was more or less inspired by Star Guard. it only had one level with rudimentary enemies that flew towards you, but you could jump on platforms and shoot and kill so it was technically a finished game

  • some sort of radial missile command clone, you played as a crystal ball in center, and you clicked on the screen to send magic missiles to that location, while random enemy pixels came flying from the edges of the screen towards the center

  • a javascript text adventure called WALKPUNCH where your only commands were WALK and PUNCH, likely a parody of Zork because the first thing you’re forced to do is punch your mailbox after walking into it

  • also pong, just pong

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My impetus for designing games as a kid was so I could play video games when I wasn’t allowed to use the computer. At eight I tried to adapt the RTS genre into a board game where barracks and town halls could be placed on a grid and took a set number of turns to be built, with construction resources increasing each turn. At the time I had played Risk but none of the Avalon Hill type stuff that RTSes borrowed from.

At nine I adapted Archon: The Light and the Dark into a chess/board game where combat was solved with RPG-style dice rolling combat, where every unit had its own stats.

I used to go to a pet store and buy coloured plastic stones that you’d put in fish tanks, and use them to plan out imaginary magic systems. Testing out different elements and how they’d oppose and synergize with one another. Probably fueled by playing Pokemon and Magic the Gathering from a young age.

I have Doom, Half-Life 2 and The Dark Mod maps from ages 10-13 where I followed tutorials, built and did environment art for 2-4 rooms, and gave up.

In my high school coding class I worked on a parser text adventure inspired by Tomb Raider and the crypt levels in Thief.

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I made a surprisingly functional little one-mission flight simulator using Flight Simulator Toolkit and a bunch of assets from I dunno where for a friend’s birthday in 8th grade.

Only thing I remember making before that are levels in some game where the character had a jetpack. It was free on the AOL games downloads section. There was a Christmas themed version as well. I don’t remember much about the game itself, but I do remember that there was no, or maybe just a much longer, timelimit on how long I could run the designer versus running the game itself.

I don’t think I want to think about this any more, though.

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I made 3 TI-83 really simple games around my sophomore/junior year of high school.

-a really really simple experiment where an enemy (I forget which character I used to represent it, maybe it was a snake-y Z and the player was a pi as a nod to a game my friend made) randomly walked (with a slight tendency to approach the player) around the standard 8x16 text mode screen and you bumped into it to attack. It was random whether you took damage or it did. Nothing fancy, I just wanted to see if I could get stuff moving around the screen.

-a more advanced version of the above but there was both a horizontal and a vertical attack button that would figure out which side of the enemy you were on. I wasn’t clever enough to merge that into a single button (but I think I could now).

-a really simple Dragon Warrior-y battle system and a menu system that let you pick between looking for random battles in a couple named locales or spend earned money to heal or upgrade your attack and defense stats. It kept your stats in an external matrix so your game was saved unless you were in a matrix math section in your class and needed to overwrite it. It didn’t really have much going for it beside the thrill of numbers going up and a bunch of wacky monster names, but one of my friends was supportive and I added a bunch of super rare difficult monsters at his request.

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I was making a Pokémon fan game in the 4th grade called Pokémon Platinium (yes I couldn’t spell Platinum). It was going to use QuickTime VR to be playable in the first person and I was drawing 360° environments in Photoshop. They were ugly as hell. I was carrying around this little notebook with me and jotting down all my ideas for the game so I could try to implement them (and fail) when I got home

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I middle school my brother and I made a war-hammer like system that used green plastic army men and a quilt / futon cover as a play field with blocks for buildings / obstacles.
Each type of army guy had different movement and weapon abilities and we had vehicles (tank and jeep).

I think we played it all of twice after figuring it all out. We were just not bored enough to play test it to the point of being balanced.

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I made a Warcraft 3 map when I was like 14. It was my own take on a fairly niche genre of custom maps – the “movie maker” map. Every player has their own quadrant of the map, and they’re able to construct as many units and buildings as they like. After a set amount of time to prepare, they take turns using the units to act out “movies” for the other players, typing the dialogue in the chat. I created unique terrain/biomes for every player to use as a setting, but what I spent the most time on was a completely unnecessary and enormous project of renaming every single unit in the game and giving each one a joke tooltip. I was just having a great old time riffing on every kind of warcraft fantasy person. I dunno. I wonder if any of those jokes are still funny. I think like 3 people ever actually played that map. Every time I play tested it with people, they just spent the whole prep time reading the tooltips and didn’t prepare any movies, lol.

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@haley already knows this because she was there, but in middleschool I created a game using the built in blender game engine called fun.blend that I would send to people in a zip file with blender since I couldn’t figure out how to build it into a standalone.

You played as a car driving around a big level of floating geometry finding stuff that I (poorly) modeled in blender. I remember that there was at least a portal style cake, a default blender monkey that spewed pies out of its mouth when you got too close, and a glowing sphere that played steely dan when you touched it.

Every time I figured out how to do something new in scripting I bound it to a random button on the keyboard. There was definitely one that cloned the player instance so you were driving two cars (or X cars until it crashed) and one that spawned little segments of road under you so that you could drive around up into the air. Most of the buttons just made the game unplayable by stretching the player out to the size of the map or sending you careening off in a random direction at max velocity, with no way to return from the void.

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Coming up with ideas influenced by half-understood screenshots from video game magazines was, as the kids today say, “a mood.”

When I was little, I would design platformer video games on paper, in a series called Powerball and then Ultraball. A lot of them looked like Mega Man. The designs looked like Nintendo Power strategy guides, with maps of the levels. I made a lot of these. Also did this for some strategy games and adventure games, but never finished those like I did the platformer ones.

A cousin came up to visit us in 1995 and he introduced me to Magic the Gathering. I never got into Magic, but I did create a whole competitive collectible card game based on characters I created. Dozens, maybe hundreds of them. I never played it with anyone though.

At some point I “had” a QBASIC “company” called Moore-Tech 2000. I had this sign on my bedroom door and tried to charge my sisters pennies for their own copies:

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A while (i.e., a decade :scream_cat:) ago I wrote up a blog post detailing the Moore-Tech 2000 nonsense as well as a bunch of other stuff about games I made up or actually made in the 90s: [Blog] Moore-Tech 2000 in 1996 | Whatnot Studios

The check marks denote the games that were actually finished. I didn’t finish most of the games listed, though I did finish a few that aren’t on here, including some sort of weird Christmas “comedy” game called “Reindeer Riots.” Sadly, I threw out my 486 in 2011 without making a backup of these and all but “My House” (a basic text parser exploration of, uh, my house) are lost.

There was also “UFO Invasion,” a short QBASIC adventure a friend and I wrote and uploaded to an AOL games channel in 1996 or 1997. It was the most completely game-like game I made before I started doing stuff with ZZT in the summer of 1997. I really wish I had it.

Uh I made a bunch of ZZT games in middle/high school. Those are out there. I got really into trying to make platformers and games like Lemmings.

A cousin and I spent a lot of our middle/high school years developing a Zork-like adventure game. It was originally going to be a text adventure, and my cousin was doing most of the programming and I was going to do a lot of the writing, but he rewrote the text parser too many times, then we were going to do it as a Return to Zork-like graphic adventure, but I think we both underestimated the amount of stuff we’d have to produce to make it. At one point, I had posted something online about looking for voice actors. I still have all the notes and dozens of pages of character drawings. For funsies, this game is canonically in the same world as my 2018 game Temple of the Wumpus.

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I think I was a “Lore Nerd” from a very early age, I didn’t spend much time actually playing with my action figures and such as I did figuring out in my head what the history of their conflicts were.

The various Lego Space factions were a particularly ripe subject for my imagination because they were presented with very broad strokes

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The old Lego themes were really so good at this. All narrative possibility, no narrative. Castle, Space, and for a hot minute Aquanauts/Aquasharks for me.

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I made Earthbound ROM hacks, most weirdly different versions for a couple of my friends where I edited the Ness sprite to look like them, the Jeff sprite to look like me, and changed early dialogue to address them as an easter egg. I think those were the only ones I shared. One of their moms accused me of giving their family computer a virus but I conclusively proved it was a trojan from a porn site.

The ones I made for myself rebalanced the game to make Ness less starter Pokémon OP and make Jeff’s kit reusable.

I messed around with hiding things in waveforms and ciphers on MySpace profiles because I got really into ARGs but only one person ever found one.

Not a game per se but I also used Halo 3 and Reach Forge mode to make trackmania-style courses for the ATV and a sealed octohedron vertical map to bounce around in using the gravity hammer.

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I was obsessed with the Mars Mission set and specifically tube-based transport systems. I remember seeing the Futurama title sequence out of context and completely missing the joke that pneumatic tubes would be wildly unpleasant — I wrote up details for how I wanted tubes in our house, to go to school, tube-based cities.

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Are you possibly remembering a game called Jetpack? Because I bought this game for around five dollars US from a local grocery store in the mid 90s and spent a fair bit of time with the level editor, although I definitely never came up with anything I had actual pride in.

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Oh lord, the pain of having unregistered Jetpack! and only being able to save one level

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I also remember making levels in Jetpack, though I don’t think I still have any from before I was 15 or 16. IIRC I still have the levels I made when I was like 20, and one of them even ended up in Jetpack 2 (though I never played that lol).

As much as I messed around with ZZT as a youngun, I never really made much for myself. I remember drawing up some plans and writing down some code for a Town of ZZT clone when I was in 5th grade, though the farthest I got was making a full-screen invisible maze to the east of the starting point. Also, there was going to be a racing minigame (as if I could have coded that at the time).

I liked collecting various rom hacking tools and messing around with them, but never made anything substantial (I liked snooping around the internals of the game more than making my own stuff). I think the closest I got was making a couple levels for SMW. One of them was really long, and I remember a portion that took advantage of the fact that the bottom row of tiles on in the level was not visible in-game (pits were signaled with coins being above them). At the end of the level was some climbable fences arranged to say “WOW” to congratulate you. Unfortunately, I could never make sense of the world map editor, so my ambitions were ultimately cut short.

When I was like 8 or 9 I made my oldest brother a 4-player chess variant out of handdrawn cardstock and paper (because he was into chess at the time). I don’t think anyone ever actually played it, but then again I never playtested it in the first place.

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does high school count? if so

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i made a lot of very profane and goofy text adventures in commodore 64 BASIC

a handful of demos of sonic fangames in klik software

in high school i got bored of all my friends playing magic the gathering so i made my own itchy and scratchy style cartoon violence card game on index cards for us to play instead

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