Not quite retro but...

[Robdav]

Back in the day, i'm talking jet set willy days, there used to be a whole thing about games being written by kids sitting in their bedrooms. I remember reading about these kids who were my age creating the games I was playing in their spare time.

I'd always wanted to do this, but life got in the way as they say.

So do we have anyone on here who had actually done this? created a "retro" game, and had it published?

If so I'd love to hear how you came up with the idea, created the game, what system(s) you wrote it on and how you went about getting it published.

 

[Robdav]

Thanks Vanpeebles

anyone else?

 

[Robdav]

Haven't done it myself other than when I use to try copying programs from magazines and teletext for our Atari 800XL .....

That was me too. Used it sit there and copy code form magazines for hours, sometimes it worked, other times it failed. I learnt a lot whilst doing that including not wasting my time copy code from magazines!

 

[Robdav]

I wrote a fruit machine program on my Spectrum, entirely in basic, but it had all the auto-nudge and gamble features that were common on real machines at the time. It was huge, took up most of the 48K RAM, but it ran pretty well, I optimised it so the visual aspects ran as smoothly as possible while all the calculating was going on in the background.

Never sought to publish it, it was for my amusement only.

sounds awesome. did you plan out how you were going to code the game up-front or just bang away at it and add features as they came into your head?