Battleships

This was one of my first games. I programmed battleships using BASIC in my 1987 Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It was a very basic game that taught me one thing. Designing games (graphics, music, sound effects, nice human interfaces and engaging gamplay) is WAY more interesting than playing the game afterwards. ;)

Noughts and Crosses

I designed a noughts and crosses simulator in QBASIC for my year 10 maths project. It was an example of an "expert system" AI, which means that every possible game combination had been pre-encoded into logic in order to deal with random human input.

Monopoly

I guess I was bored when I decided to create a monopoly simulator. Max 4 players on classical London board (Mayfair, Park Lane etc). The graphics were state of the art for QBASIC vector-based graphics engine. Sounds effects included and apart from the ability to negotiate with other players the most impressive part of this was an AI that would automatically purchase properties, build on them and make offers / negotiate with players for properties that were useful to it. One day I decided to turn on AI x 4 computer players and watch the computer play itself. Great for testing but I almost fell asleep waiting for the game to finish.

Australian Stockmarket Trader

As my year 12 Computer Science project I made a stockmarket investment simulator using PASCAL that allowed players to freely trade 150 stocks from an investment base of $10,000. The stockmarket movements where randomised with an average annualised return between 5 and 10%, with occassional stockmarket crashes built in to keep things interesting. The main thing this game taught me is that the real aim of long term investment is to make gains over and above inflation.