Rebuild of an Old Game

[prolemur]

I was thinking that a good way to learn how to program games would be to try and rebuild an old/simple already existing game.

 

Such as any 2d side scroller. =)

 

Was wondering what language these games used and if any of you have any recommendations of games to rebuild.

 

ps. it would be cool if the game was open source.

 

[Mac]

Mojang released open source for a game about a year ago, that's pretty good to practice on, think its Java

[mkylem]

The only game that I can think of that's "old"  and is open source is DOOM 3. There's really not that many that I know of.

 

If you were to use a language, just use whatever one you're most comfortable with. Try whichever ones you can out. There's C++, Java, C, C#, D, Game Maker, and much, much more.

 

There's really nothing you can't do with these languages if you use them right. 

 

BTW, DOOM 3 was in C++.

[prolemur]

Sorry, maybe i wasn't clear but it would be cool if it were to be open source, it doesn't need to.

 

All suggestions are welcome.

[Tigerbomb8]

Try making Pong.

[fletch to 99]

Try making Pong.

Pong, minesweeper, snake, Tetris, Jeopardy, matching pictures

Are all some great games. :)

[lutzee]

Okay, so mojangs Mojam happened twice, the first game used the same libraries as minecraft and was all hand coded.

The second time round there was 3 games, and the one thats probably easiest to follow in terms of source would be the one Dinnerbone worked on which was a 2D side scroller

This uses Slick2D as the main game engine, which is a really nice easy to learn library. If you want the source for the game I can provide, just say. 

[Flojer0]

My first real stab at game programming was a 2D side scroller. That was back in 2006 when 2D Hadn't quite made the comeback it has now so many of the tools and libraries you see today didn't seem to be available. But then again in that class I wan't allowed to use ready made game engines. I ended up making a crappy sonic clone with directX 8.1, in VB6.

 

Looking back, I haven't done the best to keep up on my game programming and may have done a better job with that if I had started on something simpler. From there I thought "first 2d side scroller, then 3d, then THE WORLD!!!". And when I didn't make much progress with 3d beyond loading a model stored as raw triangles in OpenGL and performing translations and transforms then it sort of fell away until I got back to building a better CS foundation in the last couple of years.

 

After that background I would say that if you want to understand how games work, start simple and work up. Or read a good book on the matter. If you want to simply work on game design itself and start building things then a tool like Unity 3D will get you going VERY quickly by comparison, And there will still be some coding needed, so you won't be a complete script kiddie.