Hi there, I'm Tim from Tim's Slideshow Games

Hey everyone!

I'm Tim, and for the past seven years, I've been interested in computers and game development. My first game was a text adventure, and somehow, I used PowerPoint to create it after learning about hyperlinks. From there, I started questioning to myself, is PowerPoint actually a viable tool for games? A few Web searches later, I was astonished to find out that it was possible to create unimaginable things, such as mouse mazes, animated shorts, and even top-notch artworks, all within a program that's intended for presentations. My curiosity sparked, and from then on, I found myself producing more PowerPoint (and later HTML5) projects and posting them to a website, Tim's Slideshow Games.

I decided to join this forum because I figured it'd be a nice place to learn more, communicate, and get feedback from people who are experienced with the PowerPoint medium. I took a glance at the projects here before signing up, and I have to say, you guys have many cool ideas. I hope to get inspired by what you guys make and find out how I can improve my projects.

See you guys around! By the way, what got you guys into making PowerPoint projects? I'm curious since this isn't exactly a common interest, and it can make for an icebreaker.

Welcome Tim!

I am so glad you've joined this forum! I thought the name looked familiar, I was inspired by your earlier works of Wheel of Fortune to come up with a version with VBA. I've built it up a LOT since then, you can check out the current version here: Wheel of Fortune

I do hope you find some inspiration here. Learn some tips and tricks, share your knowledge with us and your works, and just have fun here. Make yourself at home!

By the way, it was when Who Wants To Be A Millionaire came out with Regis Philbin was when I got into making games in PowerPoint. Turns out I wasn't the only one who wanted to make Millionaire into a PPT game, so I wanted to continue to find ways to step up my game to make it shine above the rest. I learned more about customizing shapes, transitions, animations, etc so it was more than just hyperlinking shapes to different slides.

Hi Tim,

Welcome to the Forum!

My background in PowerPoint is from using it as a platform for designing e-learning packages back in the early-mid naughties. I wanted to make them interactive which naturally led on to quizzes and different ways of answering questions and subsequently game-like. I made an e-learning page called 'Shoot the Answer' and this led easily into one of my first games called 'Shoot the Spaceships'.

I've never had any formal training in PowerPoint and thus have often worked in ignorance of some of the things it can so. I'd been making e-learning packages for a a couple of years before I discovered Triggers (duh!) More recently I discovered 'slide background fill' which opened up a number of new possibilities. Even now I've only just started to work with Custom Shows as I've not used them before.

I'm always wondering what other things PowerPoint can do that I'm currently totally unaware of!

It's quite amazing what PowerPoint can do!  I actually often find myself asking, "What CAN'T PowerPoint do?!" 

If you've seen any of my gaming titles either here or scattered around my favourite sites, you'll surely know that I am all about ignoring VBA and simply pushing stock PowerPoint to its absolute limits, so much so that I've actually needed to start including system requirements with my more CPU intense programs!

I love PowerPoint so much that I have two versions of it installed at once, and there is hardly ever a day when I don't open either one or the other!  I like 2010 for its speed, but I love 2016 for its majorly flexible media embedding compatibility - it makes me feel like I'm LITERALLY RIVALING the major game devs!

My love of PowerPoint began on September Twenty Ninth Of Two Thousand And Seven, when I opened the program for the first time in my life, on the old Windows XP desktop machine that I used to own back then.  Once I released my first game on May Seventeenth the next year, I knew there was no turning back!