I started coding two and a half years ago, when I was 23 - not to old to start coding, so don't be disencouraged by meeting lots of people who started when they were kids.
I desperately wanted to make a game, so I started learning to code even though at that time I believed it to be very very difficult.
So I picked up a book on C# and started working my way through it.
It turned out it wasn't as hard as I expected and I quickly became addicted.
I played around with C# and MonoGame for a bit, until someone showed me Lua and LÖVE - I never wrote a line of C# ever since.
I switched to LÖVE even though I've already been working on my first game
quadrant (
the only game that I knew I could finish on my own, because I can't draw) in MonoGame for a month or so, and at that time I thought that rewriting it would take a lot of time.
But since coding happens mostly in the head and Lua was really easy to pick up I managed to rewrite what I had in LÖVE in less than a week - and it was
significantly less code.
I also got more in touch with computers in general, so I read a lot of papers, used Linux (because it was way more efficient on my laptop), learned some Haskell and a little bit of C (enough to use the LuaJIT FFI).
Basically I found this huge interesting world that fascinated me, and I was once again in the uncomfortable situation not to know what of all those interesting things I have to neglect.
Gladly my will to make games persisted.
So I kept working on quadrant as much as I could, rewrote it a couple of times because everyone makes that mistake, but two years later I actually released it.
And that's pretty damn crazy.
It still sometimes overwhelms me when I realize that I've actually did this, considering I've never created anything else in my life before that - I was never able to sustain motivation for other (non-programming) projects before, so in some regard I feel liberated.
But what's even greater is that I've learned so much while making this game.
I can now fluently express myself through code and game design.
To be honest making small games is the best thing you can do.
It's a quick thrill, you learn a lot, and it's very satisfying.
I actually thought making quadrant would maybe take half a year or something, but what can you do.
It was a really great experience to make
yummy, tasty humans.
Just 5 hours of work and a lot of people enjoyed the 30 seconds of gameplay.
So if you ever feel like giving up, just make something small, always remember that you can do better (because you can!), and just keep doing that at least 3 days (or nights) a week. Eventually you will have made a game.
One last advice: Make something that you think nobody else will if you wouldn't.
That way you will have to finish it if it's important enough to you, because nobody else will.
Anyway, lots of stories left to tell, but I could go on forever and I want to go back to coding, so thanks for reading!