I just wrote an entry in my blog about stumbling across an old space shooter game that I had started in some long forgotten directories on my 5-year old laptop. After I wrote it, it occurred to me that I still had a an old Dell Dimension 4400 tucked under my desk in my study that dates back 10 years (40 GB Hard drive, 1.60GHz Pentium 4 chip, 256 MB RAM!). I fired it up, and lo and behold, I had access to all kinds of old programs (probably enough for an entire new blog entry), many of them the results of learning exercises and attempts to master certain fundamentals.

Anyway, I thought I'd ask the question to anyone who's been developing games for a while: anyone have any screenshots of early efforts--like when you were still learning the trade? Not necessarily stuff that may have come by following instructions in a book, but genuine early efforts where you were creating nearly everything, that may look strange or amusing to you now or even surprise you when you look back at them?

Here's (one of) mine: this is an early attempt I made at writing an isometric graphics engine--this was in 2002, probably a year or so after I had given some serious effort to learning C++. Hoo boy, is it hard on the eyes, but I got real kick out of watching it play again today. They're hard to see, but the sprites are vikings and skeletons that were animated in Poser, exported as an .avi, then imported to Animation Shop 3.0, then cut and pasted into a single bitmap image in Paint Shop Pro 7.0. Not very efficient, but it worked. While you couldn't click on a viking, you could toggle through them, and click on a skeleton. Once you clicked on a skeleton, the viking that was highlighted would walk over to him and start wailing on him. The pathfinding was primitive, and the collision detection a little off. And don't get me started about the horrible (lack of) anti-aliasing.

I don't have any screens of my earliest stuff; it was all EGA, CGA or early VGA ModeX stuff, written on an 8086 and although I recently found a backup of some code from that period (including a copy of the A86 assembler I was using at the time; talk about a blast from the past) I couldn't find any of the crude, hand-drawn assets.

These are some screens of an early graphical roguelike I was working on, years and years ago, when I first started learning DirectX; this would have been, oh, somewhere around DirectX4 or 5:




The font is especially cringe-worthy; it was a hand-drawn font with screwed-up offsets and crooked letters.

Somewhat later, I worked on an isometric game called Golem:




Although the codebase for that thing is an incomprehensible horror (like so many newbs are, I was obsessed with singletons; just ask Washu), visually it was my best effort to that point. I had learned quite a few things in the intervening years, especially about 3D modeling. Still, looking at those screens kind of fills me with dread. Every bad decision about singletons, hard-coded magic numbers, deep (very deep) and twisting object hierarchies, etc... it all comes flooding back. I.... I think I need a drink...

I remember all too well ignoring all the warnings about hard-coding variables--always seemed expedient (told myself 'temporary') at the time, but almost always overlooked one that would cause hair-ripping bugs.

That said, I'm a huge fan of rogue-style games. I really like the rendered dungeon with the ascii characters twist. And incomprehensible codebase or not, those are some sweet images for Golem!