When I was a child, my best friend and I were dreaming of making our own game. We got as far as writing (parts of) the story for a Lucasfilm Games-style point and click adventure, but my programming skills as a young teenager were too poor to actually make that game.
That idea has actually never left my mind though, and now, a few decades later, I've started to realize that if I don't get on it soon, I probably never will.
So I've started writing a game for the Commodore C64, 30 years after they stopped making them, and that's what I've been working on lately.
I too have ideas from back in the days and with LLMs it's easy to get started. Previously the activation energy was high but with LLMs you get the basic scaffold in place and then take it from there. Is your friend also working on it? Don't give up, ideas like this are like fine wines, am sure you brain has been running a background process on this idea.
I have an old tigsource account that in theory I could reactivate... But for now, I'm still in the pre-dev phase, i.e., I'm actively working on it but I haven't written any code yet.
Funnily, compared to my teenage self, I now think that the coding part is going to be the least of the issues. Of course, working with an old architecture that is severely limited in storage and computational capabilities raises some interesting challenges, but I do not expect them to be unsurmountable.
Doing all the graphics and the sounds all while keeping it an interesting gameplay experience (good narrative, challenging but not frustrating puzzles) will be the much harder task, I think. And ultimately there's also the problem that the majority of all indie game projects is facing: sticking with it until the end.
That idea has actually never left my mind though, and now, a few decades later, I've started to realize that if I don't get on it soon, I probably never will.
So I've started writing a game for the Commodore C64, 30 years after they stopped making them, and that's what I've been working on lately.