So you've just finished your first game, or perhaps you retain some fond memories from completing your first piece of shit barely functional pong clone created in your misspent youth? Come share your experience, what you learned, and what you would do differently.

Not including the awful text based games we've all dabbled with I just completed my first game where I didn't just simply follow a tutorial. Bow down and behold my marvelous Tetris clone Falling Blocks. Take my word that it doesn't contain any viruses... or don't; it's an awful game and you're not missing out on much by not playing it.

The whole experience was mostly smooth having already touched on most areas of programming other than the graphical part. That being said drawing shapes onto a screen caused me more grief than I anticipated. I worked with the Libgdx framework hoping to publish the game on android devices but having rendered the shapes onto the screen in pixels opposed to fractions of the screens dimensions turned out catastrophic.

Creating my own game from scratch taught me more than any tutorial or article ever could. Even though at first I doubted my abilities to create things such as basic collision checking algorithms it proved to be not as daunting as I initially thought. Although it's such a basic thing I realized that I hardly even had the ability to think; being forced to sit down and create my own algorithms really strengthened this fundamental skill.

If I could have done things differently I would have first completed the boring parts of the game such as the menu screen and basically anything that isn't the game play itself. Having created the actual game first I lost nearly all motivation to even remotely finish the other features that normally come with a completed game. It was a real struggle to put in simple things such as the score bar from the lack of motivation so that's my tip to all other newbies; finish of the boring crap first or you're likely not to include it at all.

How was the whole journey for everyone else?

I have fond memories of my first game. I was using an early version of Game Maker and just made extra levels for an "example" game for the program. I even used drag-and-drop, a form of Game Maker that's not necessarily preferable to touch.

So anyway, looking back on it, I don't think I used all of the game logic correctly. But things worked.

This was back in the days of Windows 98/ME and Voodoo graphics cards.

I remember messing around with Game Maker some ~10 years ago. I used to copy the blocks of "code" from heaps of games with no idea on their functionality into my own games. I specifically recall thinking that the comment blocks were crucial in some algorithms and the games wouldn't work without them.

My first completed and released game is an Asteroids clone, complete with retro style graphics and blippy sound effects. You can download it for free from our site www.mugsgames.com and some info about Brikt, the game that's under development right now. What did I learn from making it? Honestly, the most useful thing was how to manage the project to completion. Even a small personal project (which this was, really) takes a surprising amount of discipline to complete. That lesson is more valuable than anything technical that came out of Stroids.

My first finished game is shooting duck with a mouse. More about it here (to not repeat myself):

http://www.gamedev.net/blog/1561/entry-2256545-back-to-the-my-past/

It's funny (or maybe even sad) that the worst game I made is actually only fully finished game...

First thing ever was a turn based boxing game made in ... a ms-dos batch file. Version 2 was using 4DOS (a command.com replacer) with colors and blood (!!1!one).

I was about 10 or so. And it was basically tic-tac-toe with upper-lower-middle hit instead.

Ok, the first finished game I made with a proper programming language, an 'infinite' shoot'em up in Turbo Pascal with the graphics shamelessly taken from Tyrian (which is btw the best shmup I ever played, there's an open source version nowadays). I was reading a big book about Mode-X (some "undocumented" mode to get more of a VGA card than what it was supposed to deliver) and assembly at the time so the code was littered with assembly code. Looking back at it, it was kinda good with a 12 or 13 asm operations put-pixel.

@servant: that's my kind of game, too bad there's no AI.

The first game I made and had other people playing, was a whack-a-mole clone with ninjas instead of moles.

Each ninja has a word over his head, and the player then had to hit only the ninjas with a certain type of word (noun, verb or adjective).

I tested it with a large group of 4.th graders.

Before this I had also made a demo of a math adventure game for kids, but I never finished it.

The first game I made 100% from scratch with no tutorials or anything else, was a pacman clone I made in the end of the first semester at the university with three other students. I mostly worked on creating a pathfinding algorithm, which we then learned about in a lecture two months into the next semester.