I know this is off topic for this site but I needed some place to post this. I learned programming when I was fairly young (around 12 years old) and shortly thereafter became particularly interested in writing games, as I’m sure is the case for many programmers, and especially those who are young. I have written several games in the past for various platforms and I wanted to share them here.
Persephone’s Test
This is a DOS game written for a school project when I was in 7th grade, sometime in 1996 or 1997, and is written in BASIC. I was unable to get this working in Windows 10, but it works well using DOSBox, which runs on just about any operating system.
Tom Sawyer
This was written a year later when I was in 8th grade for a project in English class after reading the classic Mark Twain novel. Also a DOS game, this time I used actual graphics instead of just text mode, albeit utilizing only 16-color EGA at a low resolution, which was outdated even at the time it was written. This was just to keep things simple. The game was written in C as I hadn’t really learned C++ yet.
Later, in college, I ported the game to the GBA (Game Boy Advance) just as a fun little project. I had gotten really into GBA development my senior year of high school when the system came out, and I had even written a C++ library for it. Evidently I did not use that library in this port and it was written in C rather than C++, which I think was mainly to be able to re-use as much of the original code as possible. This version can be played on a GBA emulator, or on actual hardware if you have the right equipment.
- EXE of the original DOS game
- GBA version ROM
- Playthrough on YouTube with commentary that shows the GBA version as well
Ace Mario / Ace
This simple GBA game was written by myself and another guy that I had met on some homebrew GBA forums. I was a senior in high school when this was written so it was probably started in the fall of 2001. I did all the programming, my partner did all the graphics, and we collaborated on the game design. This project utilized the C++ library I had written to make GBA development easier, and so was written in C++. We submitted this to a homebrew development competition, but it was rejected due to its use of copyrighted characters and graphics.
With only a few days to go until the deadline of the competition, we scrambled to redo the graphics and theme of the game to make it all original. The redone version is simply titled “Ace”, but in my opinion the original version with the unlicensed Mario content is better since that was the original vision, and the redone version was quite rushed. We did not end up winning anything in the competition but it was a fun project nonetheless.