My first programming project was back in the summer of 2013 or 2014, where I took a short 2 week class on programming. It was such a long time ago that I don’t even remember what the programming language that was used, but it was some sort of object oriented language that makes windows applications. Even though I don’t remember the details all that well and don’t even have the source code or the game available to me, this class always stood out to me because it was really my first introduction to computer science and programming.
In this class, we had a final project where we were to make out own game. I remember some people made adventure games, but I thought it was a good idea to look back on the early simple arcade titles. I finally decided to make my best recreation of Space Invaders. I thought it was the easiest one to recreate in the short timeframe we were given for this project. Some of the programming I did was create some rectangle boxes to represent a player, the enemies, and the bullet that is shot from the player to kill the enemies. I made the bullet spawn at the player whenever they click a certain button and move up every frame of the program until it reaches the top then it disappears until you click the button again. I then made it so that collision between the player and the enemies would result in the player losing and collision between the bullet and the enemies would result in the enemy dying. Then making the enemies move slowly towards the player finished the program off.
I don’t think there is anyway for me to show this program off since it was made such a long time ago, but this specific project always stuck with me because it was my first real programming challenge. I was extremely proud of the resulting game, and I learned so much with this experience. Through this class I learned a lot of the basics of programming but also learned a lot about the limitations of what I could create with the knowledge I had at the time. During that project, I limited the player to shoot one bullet at a time rather that created a new bullet every time the bullet was fired because when I tried the other method I realized that the game would both become too easy and the newly created bullet instances would cause slow down in the program.