Games are a lot of work, you can't imagine. Pong didn't take me much effort, but that was an exception. In general, writing a game completely by yourself - even a bad one, and doing the graphics, animation, etc.. takes a long, long time. I have a couple of really good ideas for games, but even though I'm better at programming now and could probably do it with less effort, I'm not sure I want to try doing another one entirely by myself.
I'm not a computer whiz by any stretch of the imagination. I'm in the IT industry, but I'm not even sure I like it. Hell, I'm not really sure I like anything for that matter. But what made me want to write games is that I love to create things... writing stories, drawing, whatever.. and I want as many people as possible to enjoy and interact with what I create. I love writing but writing is a dying art.. there are fewer people reading now than ever before. There are a lot of good writers out there, much better than I'll ever be, who write for these fan fiction pages, and very few people ever get to see their work. Their work is diluted because for every good fan fiction story, there are 2 or 3 that are crappy. Getting published is a ridiculously hard and unfair process, by all accounts. With games, the feeling of creating is the same. However, there isn't a glut of small games because while any Zippy the Pinhead can get in front of a keyboard and pound out a terrible story, that same Zippy doesn't have the programming knowledge or perseverance to write a terrible game. The ratio of gamers to programmers in much better than the ratio of readers to writers, which means more people will get to see and enjoy what I do.
That last paragraph was kinda stupid, wasn't it? I guess I write games because I enjoy doing so. I'm probably not done writing stories either, because I enjoy doing that as well. I doubt I'll be a raging success at either one, but thats not why you get into that type of thing.
Anyway, I wrote this version of Pong while I was learning programming at Chubb in 2002. I sat in the back row of my class, and I'd really feel weird, like a kind of proud father, when I'd look up and see 3 or 4 students with my game up on their screen :-). I also like the fact that the game has been played almost exclusively by people who weren't supposed to be playing games at that time. In that spirit, this game has no sound and a 'hide' key you can hit which pops up a word document on the screen if the boss comes a-visiting.
After I finished Pong I wanted to do something else. I was planning on doing 'Pitfall', and I was at the point where I'd created a guy who could run and jump. Then I thought, 'Why waste time copying other crap?', and in the effort to think of something more original, came up with Hurdles. In this game, you play an 18 year old runner who enters into the olympic trials and attempts to win a gold medal. Once the games are over, you develop some, age 4 years and continue your quest. The better you perform in the games, the more you develop for the next games. After a while your skills diminish as your age catches up with you. You have the option of taking different kinds of illegal drugs, with corresponding risks, you'll get National and World Rankings against CPU runners who are having careers of their own, and there will be many different ways of training your runner.
I worked on Hurdles for a long time, about a year, on and off as the mood struck me. Writing this game taught me the hard way about seriously thinking out my program and planning things out beforehand. Adding extra things on the fly and punching out code without forethought made this whole process a lot harder than it should have been :-(.
Pong: Download the corresponding file below, and remember where you saved it. Open the file, and if it gives you any options, select the option that talks about 'extracting' the file. Once you are done, go to the directory where the files were extracted to and run 'setup.exe' or 'Hurdles_Setup.exe'
On some computers Pong runs really slowly for some reason, as to make it unplayable. If so, thats tough, just delete it. I'm completly done messing with this game and I'm not gonna take the time to fix that. If you can't get these files to unzip, E-mail me and I'll send you the self-extracting file that pretty much does everything for you - Yahoo won't let me put those files on here because they assume that type of file is a virus or trojan :-(.