I did a simple RPG game engine (It handled basic scripting, navigating through different maps, some screen tricks, etc), back in 1999 when I was 15 y.o. (yeah, I had a LOT of spare time back then)... I'll leave a screen here: http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/2714/proyge0.jpg in case someone wants to see what it looked like (I had 'borrowed' some tile art from several games of the time: Final Fantasy 5 and Harvest Moon :P but some were entirely made by me!!).
It was made in C++ and some ASM (I needed to use assembler to improve the performance in some critical areas, like graphics, working with 0x13h mode, I wrote my graphic library from scratch).
I can assure you that it was laborious and pretty difficult (specially talking to the hardware directly). But I REALLY wanted to learn programming, and I didn't went on vacation that summer, so I spent a lot of time coding for fun :)
Do you want to know the funniest part of it? Some years later, I lost the majority of that code. While formatting my PC, I forgot to save that... Now I only preserve some exes, but I've lost the level editor and the tile editor I made =(
Oh gosh, I feel nostalgic now.
Having said all of this, I can really understand the guy who ported this game. The will to learn is a powerful motivator.
I feel for you. I made side scrolling arcade game in 13h mode (in 2000 or sth like that, I was learning Turbo Pascal).
It was quite addictive - had many levels, upgrading ships, different win conditions, physics (you flew a rotatable rocket - asteroid style physic, but with big tiled levels, with teleports, doors and buttons, enemies, and some objectives to do(transport people from bus stops to the barber - don't ask :) ). It even had water tiles, that had different physics (less gravity, more friction), and I've implemented interactions between different objects (like flamethrower bullets changes to harmless smoke in the water, laser goes throught glass tiles, etc). I made my own sprite editor (didn't know hwo to read bmp files :) ).
I've lost it all to hard disk error a few years ago.
Keep in mind it's a lot easier to trace a picture with tracing paper than it is to draw it in the first place. (Although this is really cool- one of my favorite games.)
It was made in C++ and some ASM (I needed to use assembler to improve the performance in some critical areas, like graphics, working with 0x13h mode, I wrote my graphic library from scratch).
I can assure you that it was laborious and pretty difficult (specially talking to the hardware directly). But I REALLY wanted to learn programming, and I didn't went on vacation that summer, so I spent a lot of time coding for fun :)
Do you want to know the funniest part of it? Some years later, I lost the majority of that code. While formatting my PC, I forgot to save that... Now I only preserve some exes, but I've lost the level editor and the tile editor I made =(
Oh gosh, I feel nostalgic now.
Having said all of this, I can really understand the guy who ported this game. The will to learn is a powerful motivator.