Look, Ma, I Made A Video Game! (Or Two)

Since I was young, I've always wanted to make video games. In middle school, I learned the programming language BASIC on the (and I am seriously dating myself here) Apple II series of personal computers and went on to create crude approximations of those old Infocom text-only adventures like Zork and Enchanter. I also tried to learn assembly language, but all those ones and zeros were too much for me.

Much later, as an adult, I got my hands on an early version of something called GameMaker and created a game called "Flyball," in which you move a baseball glove around and try to catch baseballs falling from the sky. It was terrible, and is not pictured here because mercifully no records of it exist.

Then recently, I dipped my toes into the game development waters again, this time by just coming up with the concept and the gameplay and then letting someone much more talented than I am at coding - namely, my son - do the actual programming. These efforts resulted in the Hold My Beer minigame that I talked about in this blog post from last February (holy cow, it's been a year already).

Still, I wanted to make a game on my own. So to that end, I downloaded the latest version of GameMaker, which has either exponentially improved since that early version I used before, or my skills and understanding of game design have increased (I'm pretty sure it's the former). Either way, I found it fun and relatively easy to use, and I was able to create a version of the old Asteroids game (which is pictured above) by following one of their simple tutorials. You can even play it at this link (it's PC-only).

Emboldened by that success, I then moved on to my next goal: creating a real-time RPG. Fortunately, GameMaker had another tutorial and built-in assets for that, and although it was more challenging than the Asteroids-style game, I eventually - with the help of my son, who got me through one part where I was stuck despite the tutorial - was able to finish it. You can check it out here.

Does this mean I can now move on to the ultimate project, which is the Zelda-style game Zythos: The Legend of H.M.B. that I talked about in this blog post from last July? Probably not. But who knows! Stay tuned...