Making Games
History
I’ve been fiddling about trying to write games pretty much since I owned a computer. My first attempt at writing a game was on the VIC-20, and although I no longer remember what I was trying to write, I do remember the effort came to a crashing halt half-way through when I ran out of memory.
In my defence, 3583 bytes is not a lot of room, even in BASIC.
Since then, I’ve started a thousand game development projects and finished a handful of them. One of the earliest completed works was a version of Tetris on my C64, lovingly crafted in 6510 assembler and written to address my Tetris-withdrawal after my first year at University.
Today
These days, I’m just as terrible at finishing anything, but occasionally I manage it. Some of my tinkering is in Ruby (specifically, DragonRuby) which is amazing for prototyping but is not a language my brain naturally functions in.
C++ (or rather, C with a few classes when I write it) remains my language of choice because I understand it the best (and I’ve been using it for … umm, well more decades than I care to add up) - the existence of things like the 32blit API makes life a lot easier.
I might even finish another game one day…
This is a list of all articles that are (at least partially!) about "making games"
Dragonruby
DragonRuby is a Ruby-based game toolkit that I first stumbled across in a charity bundle over on itch.io(the best ten dollars I ever spent)
I had tinkered with Ruby in the dim and distant past, so I knew it was a language I sort of understood, and the whole DragonRuby package had a lot of things going for it:
2040 Eight
The PicoSystem is an utterly delightful, and utterly ridiculously-small console. With a miniscule screen and based around an RP2040 controller, the obvious pun of building this 2048 clone was just too much to resist.
It’s basic and suffers from my generally poor artwork (and even poorer sound “effects”) but it’s a complete game.
2048 was originally created by Gabriele Cirulli but hopefully he’ll forgive me stealing his idea.
32Blox
This is the first properly finished game I built for the 32blit console. It’s a classical breakout clone - destroy all the bricks, move on to the next level, and repeat.
There are 10 defined levels, after which you return to the start at an ever increasing speed (so 8-bit, much wow).