-What is everyone's experience with creating games?
-What have you worked on so far?
(opps, guess they are the same!)
I made a couple of maps for Starcraft. At one time I was planning a series of maps based on Castlevania, that you would play one after the other like stages. The maps would be much smaller than the huge rpg maps of 256x256 that caused games to lag.
I worked on a rpg in OHRRPGCE but spent most of my time making a huge forest map, and learning how to script the intro and never got any farther.
When I played Graal Online, I created some screens for a world I was creating based on Zelda 3. You can see some here
http://www.geocities.com/gamemastermak/makgraal.html
I got involved in Open Zelda and finally joined AGN. I made a small map area in a early version of OZ when you had to write in a text file to connect the screens. Then I made a small quest that I didn't finish where I learned some more of the scripting stuff. I made one area where you bomb a wall and it causing the screen to warp you to another screen with the wall removed, so its like you took out the mountain.
The last thing I did was work on a quest that was more thought out. I took a lot of time making the screen's landscape really good looking with all the Zelda 3 tiles. I planned on paper the small overworld design, placing a forest, a dungeon, and a town where you would learn about the trouble in the land. I was planning to make it episodic, where you could continue your quest as new version came out with more areas.
I took all the programming classes in my High School. QBasic, Pascal, and C++.
I searched for QBasic, because I just wanted to start learning how to program so I could make games. I came accross Dark Basic, a game programming language, and was estatic. It wasn't good for 2-D games and I found Blitz Basic which was way better than DB and for 2-D games.
In Dark Basic I copied a Pong clone to learn the code, and worked on a Tetris clone and got as far as random blocks, making them stack, and rotating them before I quit.
I came across some Secret of Mana tiles that were used in another project, RPG Creator, and fooled around trying to get the Randi animation to work and some map tiles.
When I moved to Blitz Basic I eventually made a simple rpg scrolling engine using the Secret of Mana tiles. I found out how to make and load maps, create walls and doors to warp to other maps. The source code can be found here
http://www.geocities.com/gamemastermak/rpgproject.htm
After that I got some Zelda 2 tiles and messed around creating a simple map editor and Zelda 2 scrolling overworld engine.
The last thing I worked was a game idea I had that was simlar to the rpg engine I was working on. I drew some tiles out on paper, scanned them and colored some, but my tile skills aren't good. I didn't get past making a simple map editor.
-What did you find difficult about it?
The most difficult part is finishing a project. If it isn't planned out, I run into a wall and don't have anything else to work on. Also, motivation to keep going.
-What would you like to do next?
A action/adventure game with proper game design planning beforehand.
- Is anyone thinking about pursuing a career in the video game industry?
Yes. I can see myself doing nothing else but something related in the video game industry if I don't end up designing games. A review in a video game magazine and working at or running a video game store are other alternatives.