For years before I wrote any code, I’d been designing my own clone of RuneScape. I’d played since RuneScape Classic, back in primary school, when I was hunting for free games online. My "clone" wasn’t much of a game, first it lived in a stack of A4 paper with chaotic scribbling and I kept adding stuff, convinced I was a genius. Paper armour, then cardboard armour, then wood armour. You get the idea.
Near the end of year 8, our maths teacher left for the school’s sister school. He was the kind of teacher who brought a new gizmo to every lesson, so you learnt less than you should and had more fun than you should. Before he went, he gave the year above copies of DarkBASIC, burned onto discs with the name in marker pen, having decided my year was too young for it.
A friend in that year showed it to me at his house. One line of code and a sphere appeared. Another, a cube. Another, and the cube rotated. I was hooked on the spot.
I asked to borrow it. He said no, in case he wanted to play with it more himself. He never did. I asked about it for a month, and by the time he gave in, he’d lost it. I’d forgotten what it was called, too, until the name finally came back to me and I found a copy online. In 2008 I bought my own copy, a boxed DarkGAME Studio, and joined the forums.
Nobody taught me any of it. That marks the start of the general hilarious story of me learning to program without any sort of instruction or guide, or any sort of 'good practices', or really any sort of practices at all.
War Arena was my first game with an actual goal.