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I reckon the first few years of the C64's life games were written on the C64 itself, but then written on a more powerful machine in its later years such as the Commodore Amiga. Just a guess though...

Dos based PCs were used on a few commercial games. Retro Gamer magazine (http://www.retrogamer.net/) has had several articles dealing with commercial C64 game development.

The most common way was on the C64 though. PCs were expensive, and a lot of games were developed by "bedroom coders" as contractors.

Hello! I am new here, and I have a quick question.

I know a lot of C++ (Obviously not everything, and I am constantly learning more), and I hope to be a game programmer in the near future.

As for game programming, is DirectX necessary? I am not asking if I should learn another library, etc. I am asking if, in order to be, for example, a "Gameplay programmer", is directX necessary to learn?

I have looked at job postings for such a job, and most say "Great c++ programming skills" as a requirement, but never direct x. Some say "Experience with DX9 2.0 or above level Shaders and HLSL a plus", but a PLUS is not a REQUIREMENT. I realize it would probably be a great increase in my ability to land a job.

So, my question is, In order to work at a game studio as a gameplay programmer, is it necessary to know DirectX?

No, DirectX is really only useful if you're applying as a graphics programmer, and have been in the game industry for years. A junior programmer will almost always end up as a gameplay programmer. You will be expected to learn their game engine; which could be a custom engine or something like Unreal or Unity. Each of these engine will isolate you from the underlying OS and graphics API.

It is more important that you can demonstrate the ability to solve problems, write quality software, work within a large code base, and be able to effectively debug code. Exposure to other languages is also valued; a working knowledge of C# could be valuable for writing tools. Companies working on web or mobile games might also be looking for Actionscript or Javascript experience.

...go ahead and learn that DX or OGL.

I would argue that your time would be better spent finding a graphics API (SDL, Cocos2d-x, HaXE NME, etc.) Using low level graphics APIs requires learning more about the OS than is really necessary. Most of these problems are already solved in SDL or Cocos2d-x.

http://scientificnin...mes-not-engines

This is really bad advice.

It's actually pretty solid advice, but it's missing a few caveats.

You need to be disciplined enough to take the time to refactor and clean up your code. If you're writing a bunch of functions to handle sprites, combine those functions into a unit of some sort (class, namespace, etc.). And, combine functions into generic versions when possible.

And, you need to be able to admit that the current solution isn't working very well, and start over. If you're doing this all along, you should never have to throw out the entire code base but only rewrite a specific module. The longer a bad module is left in place, the harder it is to remove or repair.

The idea boils down to iterating on the existing code until you can complete the game; and not writing code before you need it. It also accounts for the fact that it incredibly hard to anticipate every bit of code you need to complete a game.

Does anyone here own or develop on a Blackberry Playbook? Yeah yeah... I'm being serious.

I've done some development on the system using NME (http://www.haxenme.org/) and the NDK. There's also App Game Kit (http://www.appgamekit.com/).

The performance of the Playbook is nice. The eclipse based editor can be finicky at times, but you can export a makefile.

Depending on the type of game you want to make, I would strongly recommend NME. Games developed in NME are written in haXe (similar to Actionscript 3), and will run on iOS, Android, webOS, BlackBerry, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Flash. If you are using Windows, FlashDevelop is an easy way to develop NME application with full debugging support (in Flash). Compiling for any other platform is simply a matter of changing the project config or running a command on the command line; super easy stuff. haXe performance, using Flash bitmap, is pretty good on most platforms, but can suffer on lower end Android devices. There is also support for sprite batches, which are mapped to OpenGL ES 2D textured polygons.