is it possible?

[thefiree]

is it possible to create a cheap game using only basic programs like notepad?

[Beldaran]

Yep.

Free Programming Environment (http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html)

Free Game Programming Libraries (input/sound/graphics, etc) (http://www.libsdl.org/)

Free (more advanced) Graphics Library (http://www.opengl.org/)

Thousands of Free Tutorials for All of the Above (http://www.google.com/)

Have fun!

[bigjoe]

I'm using allegro. It's a good library for games, and has little to no learning curve aside that of C/C++ alone. Just gotta learn about double buffering and such.

[Pineconn]

Believe it or not, I once created a game with HTML. It just linked to different HTML pages. It worked. :shrug:

That's about as simple and basic as you can get. (Go ahead, laugh at me.) Depending on the game you want to make, you might be able to use even ZQuest.

Oh, and lol at Notepad.

[Pineconn lolz]

A dedicated "game dev" tool would allow you to make games more easily than html. And, you know, the game wouldnt just be static images.


................


html. WTF pineconn.

[Beldaran]

Oh, and lol at Notepad.

I know an extremely talented programmer who often uses notepad and GCC to write stuff.

[Pineconn lolz]

I think Pineconn was lol'ing more at the fact that it was sort of implied by the OP that you could use JUST notepad to make a game

[Cloral]

There's nothing wrong with writing code in notepad. You'll miss some of the nice features of some of the IDEs, such as auto-completion, but none of these features have any real affect on the quality of the code you end up producing.

[Pineconn]

Right, I meant using just Notepad. In fact, in that HTML game I made, I indeed used Notepad to "program" it. Of course, it navigated with a web browser.

But yeah, Dev-C++ is a good program to use. My brother used it to make poker, Battleship, and Deal or No Deal.

[rock_nog]

*old man rant* Back in my day, we didn't even need notepad to make games. We just typed code into the command prompt.

Seriously, sometimes, I just feel like we're going backwards, in that regard.

[MottZilla]

Um, no one ever programmed by "typing code into the command prompt".

Most programming is done is IDEs that are just fancy text editors anyway. You could also program (for some platforms) entirely in a hex editor. Lots of things are possible, but that doesn't mean they are easy or nice to work with.

[rock_nog]

What are you talking about? Most computers from the 80s had some BASIC interpreter or another built right in to the system. You boot up an old Apple II, and BOOM, you can just type 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD."

[MottZilla]

That counts as programming? Fuck, man in DOS you could type "echo whatever". That doesn't make you a programmer in my opinion.

When you're compiling or assembling or just plain writing assembled code then you're a programmer. Writing shit that is like a batch file ain't gonna cut it.

[rock_nog]

So wait, BASIC doesn't count as programming? I know it's a bit simplistic, but come on, it's still a full-fledged programming language.

[AtmaWeapon]

You can write some super-cool crazy things in BASIC. Do not underestimate the power of a language that can PEEK and POKE.

[Pineconn lolz]

Yes, basic is a full fledged programming language.

Mott just feels that using a single command from a subset of basic (I guess/assume) doesnt count.

[ZTC]

Notepad can be a nifty tool for coding/scripting different kinds of stuff. That's how I started out with my irc scripting. Sure, a lot of my scripts are if=then combined with randomizing variables, but they're building blocks for a main program. (or in my case, an mirc bot). It takes time and quite a bit of patience to do so, but it can be fun and quite rewarding.

[Nicholas Steel]

Believe it or not, I once created a game with HTML. It just linked to different HTML pages. It worked. :shrug:

More basic would be a DOS Batch file multi choice game :)

[MottZilla]

Yes, basic is a full fledged programming language.

Mott just feels that using a single command from a subset of basic (I guess/assume) doesnt count.

Yes that's right. Doesn't count. But if you make a program in QBASIC or Blitzbasic, that's different. But really until you can do something meaningful like graphics output it's all BS.

[rock_nog]

I'm not talking DOS batch file programming. I mean, before DOS, like the Apple II, and the Commodore 64, when you had access to a full-fledged version of BASIC accessible right from the command prompt. You could just type in BASIC commands and have the computer execute them, or you could add line numbers to have the computer store the lines in memory, allowing you to write programs. You could even do advanced things like graphics, sounds, and joystick input to make games. And I'm not talking "choose your own adventure" games, I mean genuine action games.

[bigjoe]

I used to fool around on an Apple II. I even had a wierd pseudo-rpg going. fun times.

[Gle+n*2]

If we want to be technical about this, programming can be defined as the act of writing instructions that, once written, the computer can then follow on it's own.

In that sense of the term, writing DOS batch files is considered programming. The syntax used in a DOS batch file would be classified as a high-level very-specialized (see: limited) language.

As a programmer in the real world, the measurement of your e-Peen completely boils down to the width of the range of tasks that you know how to make a computer perform.
The rare individual who has a complete grasp of machine language will be able to do absolutely anything imaginable, since he has control over each 1 and 0.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is your DOS batch file script-kiddie, who is working with a very limited set of things he can do for one operating system. In between extremes is a wide range of languages that can be classified by how much low-level control they give you over the computer (machine code being the absolute lowest), and the percentage of systems that the code will actually work on.

It takes more skill to write code on a lower level, as such programs leave the programmer much less room for error, require wider knowledge of the core concepts of the system's engineering, and usually need to be coded in a manner that isn't naturally easy to read.