I'd been tinkering with programming since high school when I discovered QBASIC came with every DOS PC. I spent most of my teen years doodling with QBASIC and very old versions of Visual BASIC (1.0) I found on the internet (Before the invention of P2P and Torrents) and later on QuickBASIC which I also found on the internet and was basically (pun!) QBASIC but with compiling capabilities and other features the normal QBASIC didn't have.
I was never that good, but I found a great community on the early internet and did some pretty cool stuff, but still really basic (PUN!?!?!?!) overall. I downloaded many .BAS files and learned a lot about coding from them. But never got too far anywhere. Still, it was fun. A long time ago I even coded the first version of my Eat It! game in BASIC complete with a 3D wireframe of my original Jasoco Productions logo. I was able to do the smooth movement using the technique someone taught me that we kind of still do today where I place the current key input into a variable to speed up the process.
key = $INPUT
I sadly do not have the code for this anymore though a friend said he had the floppy disk with it on it a long time ago but they live so far away I have not gotten it back, nor would I have a way to get it off the disk even if I wanted to.
When the 2000s came along so did my Macintosh love and I said goodbye to DOS and BASIC for a while. In the early days of my Mac usage I used various utilities to try and make games.
Started with TNTBasic, which was so limited and clunky. Not cross-platform at all and never updated. It couldn't do a lot of basic (Come on!) stuff that even BASIC could do. Certainly not a lot of stuff even Löve can do. But it was an all-in-one utility. Projects contained all resources and code and you'd add them all in as objects, but program the code itself. I paid maybe $25 for the privilege. It got abandoned long ago, even the open-sourcing of it didn't take it anywhere. It's dead now. We don't mourn for it. I still have all my projects in a ZIP file. Including the second iteration of Eat It! That project came around the time I discovered PhotoShop Effects. Soooo many shadows and beveling. God it's ugly now, but this was also back when OS X was new. This was how UI looked back then.
After TNT blew up I moved onto a new contender called Power Game Factory. It cost $44 back then and I bought it after trying the demo. I formed a tight bond with the community at the time and it seemed promising. It was built in RealBASIC, a Mac only version of BASIC that was kind of like Visual Basic at the time. But instead of opening up the coding to the end user it hid it behind using only the tools at hand. I never really created any good games with it. I did try to make a sort of Knytt/n hybrid platformer, because that was literally all you could make. Platformers and shooters.
Thing is PGF is still around. You can still buy it. It now costs $55. And is still on 1.1, which came out almost a decade ago. And doesn't even run on any newer Macs since Lion removed Rosetta. (It's still PowerPC only, probably because RealBASIC died with the switch to Intel too. Well, maybe not. They just changed their company name and it's just a pile of poop now anyway.) I feel bad for the people at PGF. They were a fun community for a while. My last post on the forums was May 21st, 2009... Only one month before I joined here. Though I don't think I was even still actively working with PGF at the time. Apparently September 2008 was the last time I was really active there.
After PGF's gears stopped turning I revisited an old friend. QuickBASIC. Thanks to the power of Intel and the advent of DOSBox I was able to realize my dream of creating an adventure game. It started out as an RPG. Turn based. Really cool. Modeled after EarthBound. It was an RPG because of the speed limitations. I couldn't have live enemies on screen as moving sprites would slow it down to shit levels. I coded that thing using the power of QuickBASIC until.... I ran out of memory. Damn. I guess even DOSBox couldn't make it have infinite memory. It was a sad day. I was in mourning. I had such an awesome thing going.
After that disappointment I had no where to go. I didn't know about Löve yet. As far as I knew there was no way to code anything without using C or something. But thanks to Apple and iOS and their improvements to JavaScript speed I decided to try my hand at HTML5 game creation. This was a while before any HTML5 game creation utilities would come along to make it easier. No JavaScript Box2D. No easy sprite systems. I did it all by hand using DIVs and SPANs and code I created myself. It was shitty. But I made some progress. But it was certain I wouldn't get too far with no knowledge of how to do it right. I always hit walls and had things stop working because there were no error messages when something couldn't be done. JavaScript was designed to fail silently. So the problem could be anywhere. And you'd rip your hair out trying to figure it out. But I had a pretty solid engine, implemented touch controls for the most part (It even detected if you were on iOS and put them on screen if needed.) and had a really robust scripting system in place much like my DOS version. It even had moving sprites. But that ended up slowing things down occasionally...
lol references! Try and figure that one out! I'll give you a cookie!
Fortunately one day something better came along. I don't remember what blog it was now but someone posted about an up and coming game framework called Löve. So naturally I tried it out. And fell in love with its power and price. Now it's been 5 years.
Of course my first project was the same one I've done before, an update to my Adventure Engine. Unfortunately I have no screenshots since it requires 0.7.x and that version stopped working on OS X a few years ago. Doesn't matter. I'd rather recode it from the ground up than try and use my 5 year old code.
So what's my motivation? I dunno. I code what I feel like but I never finish a project. Maybe one day.
On the bright side, I did almost complete one game.. My Löve version of Eat It! is 90% complete. But for some reason I lost interest for a while. But it looks amazing thanks to
retrotails. I just need to polish it and fix some of its code and make the game actually fun. Perhaps one day. I was gonna post a screenshot but my code is from an early version of 0.9.0 and so much was changed so I keep getting silly errors and just give up for now. Too lazy. I'll recode some of it, add a state system and do it better. One day I'll do that and submit it to reviewers like RockLeeSmile or something.
As for how I learn my stuff? By seeing how others do it of course.
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(even though it did have a bunch of bugs at launch, but don't worry they're all fixed now 
