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points by fusslo 3 days ago | 0 comments

I remember what a battle it was to 'figure it out' back then

If you were lucky, there was a tutorial how to do X. But requires tool Y. Where do you get Y? Here it is on some apache indexed site! Oh, I just installed Sp0rk3h. Well, time to reformat and reinstall Windows XP. Good thing I partitioned my 40gB HDD

The learning curve for Photoshop 7, when there are 0 resources was pretty tough. I remember how proud I was when I figured out how to make an animated gif. Hammer editor (Was it called Hammer? to make maps for Half-Life engine games like Counter-Strike), There was an editor for creating an archive of images. was it a .WAD archive?

That kind of self-directed learning without hand-holding, I think, is not a bad thing

[–] coldpie 2 days ago

I built some homebrew games for the PlayStation Portable circa 2004, in the middle of high school. I had some C and C++ knowledge, but barely knew what I was doing. Setting up the toolchain for building PSP homebrew on Windows XP involved a cygwin instance and all sorts of bizarre compiler and library packages that made almost zero sense to me at the time, and I had pretty much no Unix experience. I remember if I ever got linker errors, I'd just back up my source code (copy the whole dir to "game_backup_20040102" etc), delete everything, and re-do the entire installation from scratch, because I had no idea what a linker was or what the errors meant.

It's wild to me that I actually built and shipped two decent little games with that setup, lol. I put them on Itch a couple years ago: https://coldpie.itch.io/

[–] dustbunny 1 day ago

I was playing home brew games on my psp back in highschool and I think it was an absolute peak time to be a gamer.

Emulators on the psp was incredible too.

Psp would have been a much bigger hit if it had a second joystick. It was such a great console.

Also simply browsing the Internet on the psp was incredible too. This was pre smartphone. This was like right around the time wifi itself became mainstream.

Im jealous you had this experience! I tried to write some game code in highschool but couldn't figure out how to compile it. I think I used a c++ framework with a alligator as a mascot/logo... Started with an A I believe...

Wasn't until XNA in college that I was able to make a proper game.

Now I'm a professional game developer. I chased this field all the way.

Now I think making games for some of the android consoles is kinda the equivalent in that you can carry it around and show it to people. Or the Arduino is fun to make games for too :)

The smart phone is a fun target but the touchscreen really forces you into certain designs. The things that clamp to the phone and add joysticks to it definitely make the smartphone a much much more precise interface

Did you use that quick journal psp blog to spread this game? Remember when one of the jailbreaks was through a corrupted liberty city stories save file? Good times!

[–] coldpie 1 day ago

Haha, yeah, lots of nostalgia for that little guy. I have completely forgotten the technical details of the toolchain, I just remember it was GCC-based and ran in Cygwin. The games I wrote didn't use any of the hardware rendering of the system. It was all writing pixels directly into the framebuffer because that's what the hello-world sample I had access to did. For how simple the games were relative to the hardware, I frequently ran into performance problems because of this, drawing every single pixel one by one.

I did submit them to a couple of those PSP homebrew blogs and got some feedback from comments sections & such. I even submitted Dyox to a contest and won a flash cart for the GBA, though I never ended up doing much homebrew there. A couple years ago someone cataloging old PSP homebrew games actually uploaded videos of Dyox to YouTube which blew me away (sadly recorded at half-framerate, so the transparency effects don't show in the video because they rendered every-other frame).

I never looked into how the jailbreaks worked. My recollection is I only had to drop a file onto the storage and it would magically hack it for me. I actually never bought or even pirated a single game for the system, I only ever used it for homebrew and emulators and web browsing, hah.

If you're really curious, you can see the blog posts I wrote about the games 20+ years ago:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070220171034/http://brightnigh...

https://web.archive.org/web/20101012080343/http://brightnigh...

[–] arjie 2 days ago

It was Hammer. I made a map purporting to be school and the hostages were in the principal’s room. No intention to shoot real people or anything. Just play. Same map but with bomb there and in the library for no real reason. We had a “clan” and put our clan tag up when we played on LAN or at the gamer cafe but we only ever played with ourselves and a few others there so that wasn’t that useful (only dial-up everywhere).

Naming ourselves what we did would probably have us outcast today considering we did so because we liked to play on the Terrorist side. Fortunately, we moved on to AoS/DotA a few years after and all was well.

[–] kccqzy 2 days ago

As a kid I watched my mom produce plots in Microsoft Excel and even then as a first grader Microsoft Excel had a pretty steep learning curve. Some school computers had the whole creative suite, from Adobe stuff like Photoshop to Macromedia stuff like Freehand and Fireworks. All of these seemed overwhelming to me when I was in the first few years of elementary school. It only began to make sense in the later years of elementary school and in middle school.

[–] alnwlsn 2 days ago

Our school computers didn't have those but my friends and I figured out you could make animations in PowerPoint, using the extensive clip art libraries which were installed for some reason (don't remember my home computer's powerpoint having nearly that many images). Also for some reason the teachers would let us goof around for the whole hour during computer lab time every Thursday. To this day I still don't think I have laughed harder than at a particularly stupid one my friend made.

[–] grehbies 2 days ago

Even worse when you were running a fossil because your parents saw a merely-working computer as good enough. Boy, I would really like to get into 3D modeling. Windows 98SE can't run Maya PLE, Blender chugs, I guess we're using Anim8or. Not that we're getting many polys out of 700mhz and integrated graphics. Did we run out of space on our 16gb hard drive? Let me just run CCleaner and... Oh, there goes everything. And no backups. (Why spend money on a second hard drive?)

The day we finally got an XP machine and I could actually run Flash and PS and Maya and go months without having to take a hacksaw to my storage count was one of rejoicing.

Never did get beyond parsing a spritesheet and changing the animation based on inputs in Gamemaker, though.

Getting capable machines and software into the hands of the youth is in the industry's best interests, really. Not just enabling the next cohort of employees; you head off competition. Otherwise folk're forced to learn workarounds to the "system requirements" and "cost" of industry standards.