Critical Lit Games is a fascinating project for me in many ways – as outlined in my last blog, I’ve always wanted to write and to code: I remember those days in silent reading in class where I’d whip out a C++ manual and read quietly in primary school.

Now, almost 21 years later (an attempt to remember my age here), I’m back to learning how to code and create games/applications/environments – and it feels like a lot has changed.

A caveat: there’s been a huge temporal and knowledge gap between these two ages for me – I’ve always been a self taught person.

What I always remember is a lot of books.

Books, manuals, diagrams, screengrabs…a lot of printed information that I was always excited to try out.

Anyone remember this series? Anything with a CD attached would excite me so much, knowing that there was a treasure trove of codes I could access on a screen as well as a page.

The first language I had a stab at learning was BASIC (or more specifically, Q Basic), so there was a lot of monochromatic DOS screens and text based commands. After doing my homework, I’d try to plug in a few commands and numbers to see how it worked – in fact, I pretty much taught myself what variables were – once I found out you had to put numbers in its place, everything lit up for me. I was 9 at the time but that moment is still really important to me!

That’s when I wanted to become a programmer because, in my mind, this was the person who “made” games. Like all people starting off at anything, you try to emulate what you like and realise that your first attempts will fall flat at the first few paces to match up to it – I learnt this very early on! I remember that I really wanted to make a game like Hocus Pocus (the 1994 DOS game developed by Moonlite Studios, published by Apogee).

I’d spent so many hours on the game and my love of Fantasy at the time really inspired me to make a platformer that was Dragon themed – I always wanted dragons to be the protagonist rather than the antagonist. I wrote a letter to Apogee studios, outlining what I wanted in my game and with sketches because I couldn’t quite imagine my little things in QBasic living up to that dream.

I still coded, however! I made a DOS application that played Happy Birthday while drawing out a present box and balloons for a friend. I always remember the look of confusion on her face as I gave her a floppy disk in a birthday card envelope!

The first games that I implemented were in Visual Basic – where the hide/show screen proved an effective way of advancing a story. One example was where you had to guide my guinea pig through a garden – either befriending or fighting random animals that would visit him. I always remember the little guestbook feature I put at the end for people who played the game (family and friends!).

So where am I now? My tastes are no more in Science Fiction rather than Fantasy (but by no means am I ruling it out) and C# is my current language of choice.

There’s also a massive change in how I’ve been learning. Tutorials are moving, rather than staying static on a printed page: there are Youtube tutorials, a plethora of assets, forums and support found in every little corner of the internet. There’s so much all at once – I have to try and pace myself so that I don’t forget everything!

However, I haven’t changed in a lot of ways. Starting small, starting humble with a lot of thirst to learn – it’s like 21 years haven’t passed at all!

How about you? I’d love to know how your programming story started!

Suzie

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