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Comment by vegnus | Hacker News Reader

I showed my friend Game Maker 5 in 2007. We were both pretty young. It was quite the time. We didn't understand variables yet, so we had this insane system where were used Game Makers score system for variables. Once we figured our variables we felt on top of the world. Though we never wrote our own GML. We used to decomp other games and take code we needed straight out of other games and blindly re-work it into our own projects. What a good time that was.

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I got started making games in Qbasic. That code was horrendous, and is funny to read now. I did learn some lessons through my mistakes, though, and at a young age, which I think was very valuable.

I learned the value of naming variables and functions :D booya1 and booya2 don’t tell you much when looking at code a month later

Reminds me of making Chess in QBasic in school, without knowing what an array was. Was trying to encode board state in graphics (by putting some special pixels at corner of squares). Then got around talking to someone who had already made a chess game - he casually mentioned arrays. It was a revelation to me!

The cycle of just implementing something quickly and seeing the program work for the first time with wonder was something. In contrast to later on, where I delayed implementation and took hammock-oriented programming to an extreme. Curiously, AI is bringing back the 'just do it and iterate' phase with its pros and cons.

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