ID:1345831
 
Before I continue, get those weird thoughts out of your head. I'm talking about Dream maker.


When I first started, I was about 10. I started out making a Kirby, a hand drawn poorly drawn. I was reading the "Your first world" guide thing, and it was just alien to me.

It all ended up with the entire turfs made with the Kirby I made, with the main mob a Kirby and you couldn't see a thing, and it was all cluttered up to one entire mess.

Next I do was go on Byond and find Dragon universe. I played that for a while.

6 years later, I came back to Byond and actually saw that it was easier then when I was 10. I started my first game, and have been working on that ever since. Turning out good too.


What about you guys? Remember your first time?
Back in late 2001, I was co-owner of a Yahoo! Group (I don't think they even exist anymore) that was dedicated to DB/Z/GT. We had a strict no-spam policy, and any post that looked like an ad was immediately deleted.

Well, one day, a member had posted a little blurb about how there was this site with all kinds of DBZ games on it. And there was a link to BYOND.com.

The post was judged (incorrectly, in hindsight) to be spam, and was deleted. But, not before my more-than-a-decade-younger self clicked the link out of curiosity.

And it was like one of those scenes where the clouds part, and sunbeams shine down, and you hear angels chanting...lol

BYOND was exactly what I was looking for!

Around that same time, I had devised a set of DBZ-related roleplaying battle rules. They were designed originally for use during RP text-battles (like over a forum or IM), and were a basic set of mathematical rules to govern the fighters' stats (mostly based around their central Power Level, of course)

Well, for a few months, I had been looking for some way to add automation to the system (as of then, it was up to the participants to do all of the math, and keep track of everything), but to no avail.

And then came BYOND. (again, cue the angelic choir)

So, my very first project on BYOND was what would one day become DBTC! It was originally only meant to be a client to let two players connect and have a text-based fight, but with the benefit of having the underlying math being handled for them. All of the actual game that sprung up around that didn't come until later on. In fact, the first map (and intended to be the only map) was the tournament arena. It was also never intended to be a singleplayer game (even though I think that ended up being the part that players liked the most)

Development of DBTC began so early in my BYOND "career", that the original lines of code (that actually remained in it, unchanged, for a very long time) were line-for-line straight out of one of the beginner tutorials. I created my first environment, first code files, and entered my first code, all following the tutorial's instructions, and that very same environment evolved into the game.
I was 14 when I came here. Unlike a lot of people, I found the site while actually searching for a program to use to make games. Basically, I was playing a lot of video games at the time and loved the idea of making my own games or spin-offs of the games I was playing.

So I came here, downloaded BYOND, and immediately began studying how to program. I made my first BYOND environment just to get my character to move around the screen. This is incredibly easy with BYOND, but I was clueless back then and I was amazed to actively be moving a red square on a black map which I created. I was playing my own creation, and it was awesome.

I found tutorials like Zilal's and began testing my abilities with crappy games I'd construct using my limited DM knowledge. Unfortunately, none of them are still around. I remember the sleepless nights trying to solve code problems and the indescribable pride felt when I got something working properly. Finding DM was like entering a new world; it was exhilarating and fun.
I think my little brother discovered BYOND for me, about ten years ago. My only previous programming experience was with QBASIC and Visual Basic, and of course I never really finished anything with those. There were definitely a few occasions where my father said good-night, slept for eight hours and then woke up to find me still sitting at the computer, staring at the code. Ah, high school...
Before I came to BYOND you could summarize my internet activities with Pokemon Crater, forum RPs, and Pokemon Island. The latter of the three being what ultimately led me here.

So Pokemon Island was a small(15 active member) forum based around Pokemon, but more importantly Pokemon Crater. After Crater went down we started looking for a new game to conglomerate around and one day the forum admin(who is still a close friend today, actually!) sent me a PM about this site she found that we could use to create a new Pokemon game to replace Crater. Like many, I ended up getting sucked into other anime games(Pokemon Twilight and Pokemon Sinnoh Adventures in particular) and pretty much abandoned the old community until about 5 or 6 months later when I had started getting a basic understanding of DM and developing a Pokemon game of my own.

Unfortunately the old PI community crumbled away and save for a couple of close friends from it, I don't know what happened to them. Only one of them is an active BYONDite, to my knowledge.
My experience is so vague to me nowadays, it feels like a lifetime ago. Back in 2005 I had a small group of friends from the IGN forums, we all forum hopped, did roleplaying, and aspired to run our own successful forums. One guy who I haven't talked to in years came and told us of how he found this cool 'new' site called BYOND, which has tons of good games on it. He said he was a GM on one game, and invited us to play.

I think it was some Naruto game, but for time after that we all hopped around BYOND games, mostly Naruto, and marveled in what we had found. This was fuckin'.. unheard of back then, it was great lol.

Years passed, and on and off byond'ing continued, until finally I made up my mind I would learn to program, so that I can make my own game. I succeeded, and I'm glad I decided to learn it. =)
In response to Kitsueki
Kitsueki wrote:
My experience is so vague to me nowadays, it feels like a lifetime ago. Back in 2005 I had a small group of friends from the IGN forums, we all forum hopped, did roleplaying, and aspired to run our own successful forums. One guy who I haven't talked to in years came and told us of how he found this cool 'new' site called BYOND, which has tons of good games on it. He said he was a GM on one game, and invited us to play.

I think it was some Naruto game, but for time after that we all hopped around BYOND games, mostly Naruto, and marveled in what we had found. This was fuckin'.. unheard of back then, it was great lol.

Years passed, and on and off byond'ing continued, until finally I made up my mind I would learn to program, so that I can make my own game. I succeeded, and I'm glad I decided to learn it. =)

new site
BYOND
2005
It was like, 10 years old as that point.
I actually found BYOND when I was nine years old. I never made a account because I like many other people don't followed the terms it said that I needed to be a 13 year old or older.

So I waited a couple of years playing games as a guest and just getting banned from stuff until
4 years later i actually became a 13 year old and created my first ever account on BYOND.

I'm now trying to learn how to program.
In response to -Wise Fox-
-Wise Fox- wrote:
I actually found BYOND when I was nine years old. I never made a account because I like many other people don't followed the terms it said that I needed to be a 13 year old or older.

So I waited a couple of years playing games as a guest and just getting banned from stuff until
4 years later i actually became a 13 year old and created my first ever account on BYOND.

I'm now trying to learn how to program.

troll
In response to Super Saiyan X
It was new to us, hence the quotes :P
I can actually say a bit about my first appearance on BYOND nearly 10 years ago. While I originally heard about it on Ambrosine's Resources (which used to have links to all sorts of game creation tools out there), I didn't join till I heard about Dragonball Zeta in one of the DBZ mod forums. Some of the first games I played includes Dragonball Zeta (as stated), DBTC, Seika (now Teridal), Survival, and maybe a few others.

I originally wasn't planning to do any DM programming, but instead head directly towards the C++ path (already had some BASIC experience with QBASIC at the time). Weeks after I joined, I decided to play with DM a bit. Somehow, I got hooked up with learning DM that I decided to work on a few games. Started learning DM through Zilal's tutorials.

One of the first game projects I worked on was "The Industry Wars", a project that has never seen the light of day. However, one of the other projects was based on a game I made in BASIC. That game is "Text City Simulator". Originally, I was going to make it original (not just ported). However, my lack of proper experience made it harder to achieve that goal. So, I just ported most of the original code (which is why you may notice single-player elements are still in the current copies of the BYOND version). I got more history to tell later on this year since I have been on BYOND for nearly 10 years, but this is mostly around the time I was a newbie both on BYOND and being a DM Programmer.

And when I first joined, I was 15 years old (which is later than several on here).