Programming Games in Ti-Basic

[alexgt]

When I first started programming it was on a Ti-84+ in Basic. I have come a long way since but I was always looking for a (sudo) complete/understandable tutorial, if this sounds like you this is for you!

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1. Go to the home screen and press PRGM
2. Go to NEW and enter a name
3. You are now in the Ti-84+ IDE

4. From now on the key strokes are in the screen shot

5. Time to run the program, can you guess what it will do?!

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Now you are past the first step! I will add on to these quite often until there you are ready to take to the skys with your new found skilz

This is the next step, here we talk about the while loop!

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First of all lets create a program:

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We will be making a loop that counts X from 0 to 10 and then displays some text:
The first step is to set X to equal 0 and to make our loop

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Now we have to tell the loop when to run:

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This just says WHILE X is less than 0 run this code!

The next step is to tel the loop what to execute:

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This makes X's value go up by one every time the loop is run

Now we have to give visual feedback when the loop completes!
CHALLENGE: Do this by your self and see what you can come up with (it doesn't need to be exactly like mine)

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Outputs:

But wait the output is cut off how can wee fix this?!
Look in the next step to find out really how simple it is

All you need to do is separate it into two commands!

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Now you may be asking how on earth do we get that ugly prgmLOOPS off of the homescreen, that is also very easy

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Just add ClrHome to the first line in your program

Now you will get this:

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Now for that pesky Done at the end:

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All we do here is add a Pause at the end and that makes all line execution stop until the user presses enter

It should give you this:

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Congrats you have finished part 2!!!!

Sneak peak for next lesson:

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[alexgt]

Err... Thx for moving that Cumred I realized right after I posted it xD

[Snektron]

No problem also cool that you're making tutorials

[alexgt]

Thanks, I have a friend at school that wants to start with making games in Basic so I told him I would start a tutorial today
Also more in-depth tutorials will be a video (like larger game projects)

[p4nix]

Keep him interested I remember making that Whack A Mole C-project for fx9860 to get a friend into coding - we were only missing a highscore save feature and a kind of menu --> we stopped

[alexgt]

Yeah I am thinking most every day I will post something here

[Streetwalrus]

Nice, a tutorial for the absolute beginners. Good luck with it.

[alexgt]

Thank you

[xlibman]

I hope you update this in the future. It would probably be a bit less clickbait to the eyes of people who are seeking for a full getting started with BASIC game programming tutorial.

Since there are already many tutorials out there including one by TI, perhaps that to avoid reinventing the wheel, your tutorial should focus on getting people to learn game-specific tricks more, while encouraging them to check out TI-BD and other tutorials out there for info on commands.

[alexgt]

Yeah, I am planning on making one today about loops (SynText has taken a lot of my time) and after that I will start making little game projects.

[xlibman]

So how is this going, @alexgt?

[alexgt]

I posted another tutorial but the pics are messed up and I haven't had time to fix them .

[xlibman]

Oh I see. You really should bump this topic everytime you post a new tutorial and change stuff, though, because I did not notice your edit until recently. >.<

[alexgt]

I didn't bump it since the pics are broken, I guess I need to fix that xD

EDIT: pics are fixed

[xlibman]

Ah I see now. Glad that they are fixed. I think pics should be uploaded on ourl.ca or img.codewalr.us for posterity.