Have you ever tried to make a game, or a mod?
Yes.
And if so, how did it turn out?
Sit back, this will take a while...
(I'll try to refrain from giving you my
whole life story.)
I started programming when I was ten, back when the TRS-80 was still an amazing computer.
Mostly stuff you'd find in books, using BASIC. Nothing super creative.
Then I played the game Zork, and knew that was what I wanted to do with my life. (At the time.)
I found a book called "How To Write Text Adventures" (or something to that effect, I no longer remember the exact title.) It taught me how to create my own text parser, and while the one in the book was painfully simplistic, I quickly figured out how to make it more elaborate and intuitive. I wanted it to be at least as good as Zork's, though I don't know that I ever reached that point.
For the next six or seven years I taught myself how to program, making increasingly larger text adventures on (now-deceased) floppies, figuring out how to do rudimentary graphics (probably Mystery House level, but in color), making music and sound effects, and focusing on a text parser that understood as much as possible and occasionally was sarcastic, depending on what the player typed. I was pretty proud of it.
As I gained access to more and more adventure games, I quickly realized that what I was doing didn't have as much of a market as the point-and-click adventures that were taking over, but I didn't care, as they weren't as robust as what I had planned. Even though I was just one person, I was sure I could make an impressive enough text adventure that everyone would want to play. (Spoiler alert: I could not.)
Once I went away to college to major in Computer Science (the closest I could get in our area to some sort of computer game related degree), I quickly came to realize that my programming methods were atrocious. I was what they called a Spaghetti Programmer, as my code was all over the place and jury-rigged, and utterly lacking in any notes that would allow another programmer to come along and fix or improve it.
Having come away from that realizing that coding was not my forte, I switched to an English major but did not give up my love of game creation. I instead switched to various programs/kits/engines designed to facilitate the creation of text adventures (or 'interactive fiction' as I was seeing it called on FTP and Usenet sites.) Unfortunately, I was at odds with most of these, as they weren't entirely equipped to do what I wanted to do. In a lot of ways, most of them were a step backwards relative to the parser I'd made as a kid, as they were more about end-user convenience than providing a robust game experience. My tongue-in-cheek detective game, "Pureluck Jones* and The Maltese Chicken" did not get along well with the program I was using, which was hell-bent on turning my noir mystery into a Zork-like dungeon. Even murder mystery writer Glandula Raspberry* acted like a random cave minion if the player opted to "throw gun" at her. (I know, why would anyone throw their gun at her? [Besides the fact that it had no bullets.] I spent 95% of my time either trying to think of things people would type and preventing them from breaking the game in the process, or else undoing the default behavior of the premade parser.)
(* - I'm aware these are not good names. I was basically a kid when I first came up with them.)
With every program/toolkit/system I tried after that, my ambition always overshot either my ability to work with said program, or my patience. Usually both. Meanwhile in the rest of the world, technology and game scope continued to increase exponentially, and my efforts seemed all the more futile. I eventually more or less gave up the dream of making a game.
BUT... I still occasionally try. Every time "National Novel Writing Month" comes along, I get a bee in my bonnet to whip up a small interactive story, since there is still a tiny niche market for those. Though even in those instances, I get distracted and dive down a rabbithole of minutiae, for instance, coming up with a ton of randomly generated book titles in a library the player visits, or a belligerent wishing well that comes up with countless reasons why it can't grant a particular wish. And so on.
So, yes, I've tried, many times, to make a game (though weirdly enough, never a mod, though I did use hex editors to modify games back in the day, but that wasn't the same thing.) But all of them, from Bick Flemm and The Space Gerbils** of Pumbly-Fraxlekrud, to Pureluck Jones and The Maltese Chicken, went unfinished, though extensively designed out from beginning to end.
Maybe someday! Who knows.
(** - This was well before Baldur's Gate.)
P.S. The only 'game' I ever technically finished, was the one in my senior year high school final project, where I made a combination tic-tac-toe, mini text adventure, and paint program in Apple Basic, blowing my computer science teacher away and giving me a false sense of what college computer science would be like. (Spoiler: not Apple Basic.) Oh, and I have since made and run lengthy Pathfinder (and Savage Worlds) pen-and-paper campaigns for friends, but that's another thing entirely.
[Note: This answer is just for the forum, though I realize it'd be too long to put in the article anyway.]
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