My attempts to make games

To continue yesterday's subject of games:

In my college days, as I was learning C++ I really wanted to make a text game engine. I wanted to do it in a way that you could just provide a series of text files to the engine, each representing rooms and items and monsters, etc... so that once the engine was finished I would just be able to type up text files to make new games. Alas, that effort fizzled, and I'm guessing there's better ones on the net by now anyway.

I wanted to be a video game programmer for the longest time, so I had several of these efforts. I also had a try at an "Alleyway" type game, where you have the paddle on the bottom and a ball that bounces around and you need to hit the blocks and break them. It was sort-of working, but sometimes the ball would travel through the outer wall of the screen, and then it would keep going forever until you terminated the program.

The ONLY successful game-making effort I had was a school project I chose to make a Minesweeper game with the OpenGL graphics library. Everything worked the way it was supposed to. The little squares visibly depressed when you held the mouse over them. You could do a controlled clear by right+left clicking, just like in the real game. It had a high scores list with a very simple encryption system so that you couldn't easily type in your own scores. It had easy, medium and hard, and custom levels and everything. When I told people I was making a Minesweeper game they weren't too impressed, but I got a lot of nice comments on the final project--all the extra little features were enough to interest people. :)