Computer Games You Can Program Yourself (1978) | Hacker News Reader

Computer Games You Can Program Yourself (1978)

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35 pointsjaybol26 comments

I found something much better than this when I bought an old Apple //c off of Craigslist a while ago. This Apple //c came with a single software package that included two disks and a book. It looked pretty lame at first.

The first disk contains a typical BASIC programming tutorial.

The second disk contained 15-or-so of games written in BASIC. Some graphics games, some text games.

The book contained a high-level design document for each of the games on the second disk, along with a low-level, line-by-line explanation of each line of code. It's amazing.

I would have killed for something like that as a kid.

I've been working on a simple voxel based game as a hobby project on the iPad. It feels reinvigorating how a single person can quickly hack together something really nice when you only need to do 16x16 pixel textures. I think people underrate how exponentially increasing production costs are a drag on game developer creativity. The human ability to suspend disbelief is monumental and I think these new constrained voxel games and platforms like the iPad will see more experimental gameplay emerge much like it did in the early eighties.

I've been on the trail of this thought for over a year now. The game-making process at this time is so constrained by the fidelity of content that the only ways to really cut costs(or improve accessibility for amateur-level projects) is to rely on low-fi and generative techniques, and to skimp on diversity of content - all of which come at a price.

Crowdsourcing techniques might help at some point in the future, but we still aren't connected enough to make professional-level creative collaborations as simple as joining a game of Quake.

I just tossed some other projects aside and started working on something this evening that puts my thoughts on simplifying the design process into code. It'll be able to make something roughly akin to a single-player hypertext-game or visual novel. Once it hits that goal, gradually I'll expand it and make it more ambitious.

That was back when it was considered good coding practice to code on line 10, 20, 30 etc, so that you wouldn't have to rename all line numbers in case of extra unexpected code lines.

I loved those as a kid, there was also a magazine that would come every month with program listing that I would type up and then try to modify... It was a lot of fun and a great way to learn!

Sometimes I wonder how kids can learn programing by themselves now, there's no environment directly available and if their parents don't introduce it to them, I don't think they'll stumble that easily into it...

What was great at the time, is that any kid who had a computer or access to a computer would sooner or later play a bit with basic and try their hand at programming a bit

> there was also a magazine that would come every month with program listing that I would type up and then try to modify

That wasn't 3-2-1 Contact magazine by any chance, was it? Because I remember typing the BASIC games they published into our computer.

It was a french magazine with programs for the Thomson computers...

I used to LOVE that mag, but I don't remember it having programs. Wow, it was cooler than I knew!

I think they had about one program a month or something? But you're right that most of the magazine was about other things.

I'm pretty sure that the programs they published were submitted by readers, but it's been a long time since I last saw that magazine, so my memory is fuzzy.

I think that you are right about the fact that kids will not stumble into programming if they are not searching for it.

On the other hand, they have lots of reasons to search about programming (think of the mandatory techie present in most TV shows) and there are really nice tools to learn these days. I am thinking for example of Scratch, an MIT project devoted to learn programming to kids http://scratch.mit.edu/.

So resources are there and there are lots of spark that could ignite kids interest into programming but the real problem, I think, is not availability or interest, but the availability of "funnier" and "easier" things to do on a computer : social networks, downpour of games (when I was a kid, getting 2 games a year was a tremendous boon. Today, my nephew has access to more games than he could ever dream to play).

This has been in fact described quite well by PG in his essay : The acceleration of addictiveness http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

I remember reading this when I was 11 or 12-years old (about 25 years ago). I had to ask my mom what 'Russian Roulette' was, which made her a little nervous about what I was reading.

My favorite line is from that game: 32 PRINT " CHICKEN!!!"

The charm of a Jr. High kid armed with BASIC programming skills!

For a full archive of the book: http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/

I used to type in the code from books/magazines to create games on my ZX Spectrum. Unfortunately I was never interested in the programming aspect, just in getting the game they showed in the picture to work. I think I grasped some of the basic principles like GoTo though. I recall an amusing-in-retrospect my 8 year old self had with a classmate:

"I have loads of games for my Amiga."

"Yeah, well I program games myself on my Spectrum."

"So do I! I know how to write in programming language." /bluffing

"Me too. I know BASIC." /massive bluff, expecting opponent to fold

"Yeah, BASIC is quite easy." /poker face

Are there any blogs online mags etc or something like that who does this?

I want to know, too! After typing in all the programs from the tutorial that came with my computer, I used to buy the Commodore magazine to type in the BASIC programs. One magasine even featured code to write your own windowing toolkit!

Here's one with a handful of scans: http://www.zzap64.co.uk/c64/CommUser.html

Thnx I was also thinking for something like Flash or HTML5

Here's a great set of demos for Python's turtle graphics module: http://code.google.com/p/python-turtle-demo/ You can easily step through the source code for each demo to get a feel for the basics of programming and 2D computer graphics.

There's a long slide deck included that goes over the features and their use as incremental teaching tools.

Here's a standalone turtle game development tool that basically wraps python's turtle and gives it some comfortable defaults for people who aren't ready to think about python or modules just yet: http://pythonturtle.org/

This was discussed two weeks ago as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866103

Wow... I remember this! Particularly for a) discovering that BASIC in the book was not the same as BASIC on my C64 - figuring out the needed changes was a major learning stimulus; and b) the amazing ELIZA program which wasa huge influence on my entire philosophy...

b) the amazing ELIZA program which wasa huge influence on my entire philosophy...

Why do you say your entire philosophy?

It got me thinking along the lines of "what is thought/intelligence/free will/nature of consciousness" etc.

Would be nice to see something like this made for languages that are currently popular (and 'easy'), like Ruby or Python.

I think the dialect of BASIC these programs use is in a kind of a sweet spot that teaches just enough high-level stuff while limiting you to low-level IF/GOTO and GOSUB statements that are close to what processors actually behave.

I just remember the endless minutes spent looking for something I'd mistyped. Happy days with my Video Genie!

The checksum at the end of each line saved my *ss. I don't know how I could have typed in the machine code to the C-64 Red Baron game without that!

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