I made an FPS in Game Maker for an assignment at University, back then I had to pay a whole 10 English Pounds to unlock the functionality for first person. It was called Blood Betrayal, something to do with the mafia, it’s as bad as it sounds and looked worse. I’ve not thought about that game in a long time, I might bootcamp later and play it lol. I’m actually surprised that I completely finished it and didn’t need to deviate from my original design doc.
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Just found this thread and I hope no one minds a resurrection after several months. 
My very first game attempts were text adventures written in Extended Color BASIC on TRS-80s. I was really into text adventures way back then (around12-14 years old) so of course that’s what I tried to make. Once I got used to graphics and sound I got into that, though, and made my first actually “finished” game.
It was called “The Tidy Bowl Man” (based on the character from the old TV ads). You were a little guy, the Tidy Bowl Man, and the bathroom exploded. You had to run around and pick up all of the scattered pieces of toilet paper before the timer ran out. I used that “engine” (hah!), added more color, music, and sound, and made another game where you were a girl who ran around picking up pieces of her broken heart. Ah, those were the days.
I’m currently reading “Masters of Doom” and it’s a great story about id Software, which also talks about the early games of John Carmack and John Romero. Highly recommended if you like that sort of thing.
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This is my very first full finished commercial game:
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First game: “Graphic” (lines and circles) bear on Z80.
I knew this would happen when I clicked that link 
The first game I did, was done with Klick and Play. You had wreck a living room with different kind of tools and weapons.
My first commercial game was a simple horizontal shooter with an octopus, made in Flash.
It’s still there(you have to wait until the annoying artificial loading is done).
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The fact that ya’ll are old enough to remember your first finished game makes me feel old…and possibly senile. I’ll skip past whatever I did in BASIC on Atari and Commodore back in the day. The earliest game for IBM compatibles (That’s a PC, for you younger folks), unless I’m forgetting one, was a game where you had to select a section of space to travel to in your spaceship looking for minerals or whatever it was. If you picked the wrong one, you’d get attacked and have to fight an enemy spaceship in turned based combat. The goal was to find all the minerals before getting attacked.
A few years later, still in the 90s, I made a game called Soccar. You played soccer with car sprites. You were cars purely because I had no way of animating people. Over the years I’ve thought it would be fun to update that to 3d, so you can imagine how hard I kick myself every time I see a Youtuber play Rocket League. Although in my game, you had these feeler things in front of your car and had to use them to dribble the ball, so any modern remake likely wouldn’t have had the same fun factor as Rocket League. That’s what I’m telling myself anyhow. 
There was also a casino game I did around that time, and a turn based strategy similar to what Koei was putting out in the day, without the fancy graphics, of course. As well as a smattering of other games. I have no idea where they fit into the chronology though, as it has been too many years and too many beers for those memories to remain fully formed.
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This: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.KaranlikVadiGames.StealthKill
Been working with unity for more than I can remember, but I always planned big and was never able to finish any game, until about a year ago, when I heard about the 24 hours challenge. So I challenged myself and the outcome was that game…
I really recommend newcomers to challenge themselves with the 24 hours challenge, because it forces you to think small and deliver…
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i don’t now how to work it:(
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My first (and only!) completed game was a text-based QBasic game I think I called “Radiation”, which I wrote ca 1995. ^^; You had to work regular old jobs and earn enough money to buy a ticket aboard a spaceship heading out of our solar system before you died of radiation (from some…er…global catastrophe or something) and/or the sun exploded 
With random events, option to spend those hard-earned credits on life-prolonging meds, etc. Heh.
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idk some asset store asset I bought and resold.
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2006 called, it wants its meme back.
Man, I’d love if you remade it in Unity, the idea is GREAT. Make kickstarter or something with the original as download (if you still have it).
Ha ha. It is hard to remember things from back then I agree. I remember working on so many things and honestly most were never finished because I was always making something ambitious for the time period. As a result I’d run out of RAM space frequently. It’s kind of strange really Back then I always wanted to push ahead to make more than what was commonly available. Today I want to push back to more of what it was like back then. Maybe it is that I rarely saw the kind of things I wanted to make so now want to finally explore it.
How did your work long ago influence your ambitions today? Do you have any “unfinished work/goals” from long ago that you think about bringing modern tech to?
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Aah, I wish I still had a screenshot somewhere 
Mine was a 3D table tennis game I was very proud of it, although the bat hitting the ball physics were as dodgy as hell!
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It was because of my ambitions then that I do what I do now. I’ve wanted to make games for a living for as long as I can remember. Pre-teen me would be super stoked to know what I do for a living now. HIgh school me might be less than thrilled to know how much I make though.
I’m so utterly burnt out from coding for a client that I can’t bring myself to finish up any of my current coding projects, but having a brand new 970m to play with has inspired me to do the artwork for a game I conceived back then. Like Soccar, I’m late to my own party because it is an asynchronous multiplayer horror game. But I originally starting designing it in the late 90s or maybe early 2000s, it was around the time I saw Halloween H20, so again I’m kicking myself for not doing it sooner. Somewhere on an old computer around here is my attempt to start on the game by making my own game engine in OpenGL. That was a thing you did back then when you wanted to make a 3d game. Which is probably why it amuses me so much when all these whippersnappers complain that not everything is done for them. Not only did we not have a “Make MMO” button, we didn’t even have a “Start Game Engine” button. Apparently, given my problems with Englighten, I’m still trying to push things further than they want to go. This is the horror genre though, I love horror, but it is like the rich guy who only gets dates because he’ll buy the girl stuff, or the promiscuous girl who only gets dates because she’ll put out. Everyone seems to make horror games just because they mistakenly think it is easy. This genre, more than any other, deserves someone who is going to put some attention to detail into things and push limits rather than circumvent them, someone who will just give it a hug and say to it, 'I love you for what you are, not what you can do for me."
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Feel free to play it and find out. Can you make it to the secret pineapple level? Probably not, since the game is absurdly hard and taught me the lesson of having other people test your games to get a feel for the difficulty.
I think horror gets a ton of attention from copycats due to it’s huge popularity with YouTube streamers. These days “horror” tends to mean (to the masses) a walking simulator with a creepy atmosphere and lots of jump scares.
Much like many “easy” genres in many mediums however, to make something truly superb takes lots of effort, so good luck!
The fact that I’m having a problem with lights in a horror game probably confuses the crap out of a lot of horror developers. Haha. I do worry that casual horror fans will look at the screenshots and wonder why it isn’t dark all the time. I think hardcore horror fans will realize that horror isn’t about the dark, but the contrast between light and dark. Both metaphorically and literally. I don’t think I ever jumped so high as when I was playing Doom as a kid and walked into one of those dark rooms just as my cat decided to jump up on the screen door. If the whole thing was dark, my mood would have never dropped enough from the baseline for that combination to scare me.
Most horror games seem to just throw in horror tropes without understanding what makes them scary. Jump scares aren’t scary in and of themselves, being startled is not the same as being scared. You need a real threat, one that you can do something about, backing up that jump scare to make it scary. The startle just creates the temporary vulnerability that amplifies the fear of the actual scary thing. Fear is about what may happen, not what did happen. The jump scare is the beginning, not the end. You may get anxious knowing that you could be startled at any time, but with nothing really backing up the startle, the impact is greatly diminished unless you are scared of your own shadow.
Of course, I could talk for hours about horror game theory. You need emotional highs to make the lows have more impact. The real trick is to get the balance right. That is immensely hard to do, and I’m hoping that I can pull it off.
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Heh thanks! I no longer have the original, unfortunately. Lost in old hard-drive crashes before I learned the valuable lessons of making backups regularly ^^; Same story with the second game I worked on - a text-based RPG inspired by the BBS DOOR game Legend of the Red Dragon (very cool game, look it up. Can be played in a browser these days, I think).
So sad, the fate that befall games in development that have not yet been backed up, when the hard-drives they’re stored on suffer the ultimate misfortune of mechanical hard-drives; the click of death.
Moral of this story? Everyone, go make backups of your stuffz. Right now. Just to be sure. You’ve been thinking about it, but you keep postponing it because it is inconvenient, right? Stop postponing! Go backup. Go go! Procrastination is the thief of time!
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This. I was learning gamedev at the turn of the millennium, consuming everything Andre LaMothe, and those god-awful green-and-black covered books. Tons of them. So, most of my projects were ambitious, looked cool, but were never finished.
Word.
I consider all of my game designs (going back to middle school) that are in any stage of development, from concept to prototype, to only be “shelved”. Those game ideas I plan to take off the shelf, and work into my future projects at one point or another.
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Agreed. I like your comment about Doom, since it seems very in contrast to the current state of horror games, where much of it revolves around ensuring your character is totally helpless at all times, where Doom you’re able to run at 100mph and pump out hundreds out rounds a minute but can still feel trapped and helpless in ways that aren’t quite the same as other action titles.
A title that comes to mind I think that really highlights you what you said about the dark and light is Metroid Prime 2. If you haven’t played it, there’s a parallel “dark world” where your health is constantly depleted except in small safe zones of light. These zones are activated by firing your weapon at them, and don’t stay active permanently, so it creates this amazing feeling of tension as you fumble around in the dark searching for somewhere safe to hide. MP2 is by no means a pure horror game but I think it well highlights how horror game design can have a ton of depth and be very “gamey.”
But I think we’re getting a bit off topic here!