I was digging through old archives and I found some old projects coded in Visual Basic. I had zero training or understanding of how coding worked, but by playing around with it was able to brute-force my way to something that worked (I remember thinking "it would be great if I could reuse the same chunks of code around" -- I would later learn what functions are). I'm not sure when I coded those... it must have during or a bit before high-school.
This was a fun project that I did with my best friend. It was at the time when Myst was the coolest game around and we thought... we can do that! We used 3D Studio Max to generate 3D scenes, and using Visual Basic coded a basic puzzle click-game that navigates through the pre-rendered static frames.
You begin outside of a mysterious house. You need to find the key around the house before you can enter.
Once inside, there is a door upstairs that is locked. You can go downstairs, but you must first explore the room a bit to find a crowbar!
Once you get downstairs, you can force a lever with the crowbar (that you can use from your inventory). The house rumble, and you just opened a portal to another dimension!! (Why not!).
And the game end when you go to the bedroom upstairs and find and enter the portal... maybe one day Hantist 2 will be made and we will finally, after all those years of waiting, know what is beyond that portal!
I had been playing Final Fantasy 3 using emulators, and I was fascinated on how such a game could be coded. I built a basic game engine (in Visual Basic again) where an ASCII map was render as tiles. I took screenshot of Final Fantasy 3 from the emulator and used it as the tiles of that game (sorry Square).
There was not much you could do in this game besides walking around the world. Still I got it to be pretty close to the feeling of walking around a house in any of the early FF games.
When I was a kid, my best friend and I discovered that when we flush the toilet, it exits through a pipe on the side of my parent's house and went directly in the river (we used to play in that river all the time, yum)! We soon after discovered that there were lots of rats lurking around.
That inspired me (as a kind of therapy perhaps?) to build: the rats game!
The hungry rats move from the garbage can to the house, which you need to shoot (click on) in order to prevent from damaging the house.
Everytime the rats gets to the house, it gets damaged. The longer you last, the highest you score, and there was even a high score table to that game:
There are so many little projects that died in a hard-drive crash. I really wish I could have saved the tons of Duke Nukem' 3D maps we built to play on modem connection. Ah, those were the days... :).
