I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.
Unfortunately, since I don’t really consider myself a programmer, and I don’t really do any programming, it’s a bit hard for me to say what my greatest application is. I can however tell you of some of the programming achievements I’ve made in my past.
Way back in high school I started out programming using a programming language called BlitzBasic. Over the couple of years I used this language I wrote a number of games, most of them pretty awful. But two games did go somewhere. The first was a side-scrolling platform game I called RollingBall (the main character was a yellow ball). It’s where I first learned about game physics (albeit very primitively) and about how not to write a program (i.e. GOTO = bad). The second was a top-down RPG game in a similar style to the Pokemon games. Although both of these games suffered from a bad case of programmer artwork, they were pretty fun to play (or my deluded variety of fun, anyway).
The greatest achievement I’ve made though was the moment I finally got an operating system kernel that I had written entirely from scratch working on my home computer. It did nothing more than print ‘H’ in the top-left hand corner of the screen… but that’s all it needed to do. Knowing that the code you’ve written is the only code running on a computer system is a pretty awesome feeling.
I really enjoyed that side scroller you wrote about four years ago… it wasn’t RollingBall though. Remembering to jump over the glitches was all part of the challenge.
It probably was the same game, but with the really bad name stripped out. 😛