Old Games
18 Aug 2026
Lobbablob - 2018
A few days after graduating from highschool, I started to feel a little nervous. I was enrolled in a Computer Science program, and I knew next to nothing about computers.
If I was going to do this major, I'd better see if I actually like it.
Not long after that, I asked friend of mine to lend me his copy of The Self Taught Programmer. At the end of the book, the author starts to say things like "Alright, if you got this far, you are ready for your first programming job!" I remember thinking that was funny, because I was definitely not ready.
Once I finished the book, I wanted to learn more. So I turned to YouTube and landed on The Coding Train.
The first "complete" video game I made was based on this video from the coding train, a Flappy Bird clone. I added custom graphics, a starting screen, coins, a point-and-click-to-shoot mechanic, and a few other things like fart sound effects.
Tubbalub - 2019
Thanks to my head start in the summer, I was pretty far ahead of many of my classmates in the CS program. The first semester was just programming basics in Python, which I already knew. I was nervous anyways though, especially for the final exam. It was snowy and below freezing outside when I walked across campus to take it. By the time the exam was done, it was clear to me that I could have aced it before even taking the class. Yet, I still didn't feel like I was on track to get a real job in 4 years. I was not attending MIT, Stanford, or anywhere like that. If I wanted to be serious about this stuff, I would have to teach myself.
The next semester would involve Java. So I turned back to YouTube, this time looking for a Java game development tutorial.
Pretty soon, I had completed all of this Java 2D game tutorial, implementing my own graphics and game concept along the way. The tutorial series ended abruptly, without a satisfying conclusion. So I had to finish the game myself. I added enemies to the game, zombie dinosaurs, and gave the player a gun so he could shoot them. It needed a bit more, so I added the ability to chop down trees, and made that a requirement to fill up your four slots of ammo. I would often spend a whole day in the dining hall to get two meals from one meal credit. One Saturday, I decided to kill my time in there by giving my game an original sound track. If you spend enough time clicking buttons on beepbox.co and trying to make it sound good, you will eventually have a song!
0xB33F Games - 2021
Near the end of my time in college, I took a class on game development. The class split everyone into groups of three or four who would be making games together for the entire semester. We didn't learn much about programming in that class. The engine was provided for us, and all of our game logic had to be implemented in a scripting language. But that meant we had plenty of time to goof around.
Epilogue
It's 2026, and computers are a little different now. This past weekend I had some spare tokens, and so I pointed a few LLMs at my old game projects and asked them to be ported to the web. After steering things in the right direction, and working through a few hiccups, I had finished web versions of 6 different video games I thought I might never play again, let alone be able to share with others.