I'm trying to find my starting point and I think it would probably help to figure out where other people started. If possible, I'd really appreciate some recommended resources or routes to take. Thanks.

Plus it's always nice to hear people's stories!

I started out by modding games for fun, but as the years went by I began taking my work more seriously, and was eventually abducted into large team projects where I was pushed to redefine and improve my skills. It turned from a silly hobby into something I could seriously see myself doing. I gained some important contacts within the industry as I pursued my career a bit more seriously, which opened the door for me to eventually work as a contract effects artist for a AAA title. I'm now leading my own independent project, but focusing most of my work in the field of sandbox design.

First time I set my eyes video games, I already knew I wanted to make my own. And that's how I started programming.

I think I was looking for something in the attic when I stumbled across my dad's old "Object Oriented Programming in C++" book. I thought the cover looked cool (It had a robot on it), and the title was mysterious so I brought it down stairs and started asking him some questions. That night we installed visual studio express and started playing around with some stuff, which was good for both of us since he hadn't programmed in a long time. I had a lot of fun with c++ for a few months, and made a few (really awful) text adventures and calculators and things for windows command prompt. When I got bored of command prompt, I tried making some windows apps in c++, which I had a lot of trouble with which led me to learning c#. I played with c# for about a year, and then for a random reason that I don't remember I switched to Java, which I am now really hooked on.

From at least 10 and up I was making my own game designs and board games but by late 13/early 14 I got tired of them not being made. I realized already that no one else was going to make my games for me and I couldn’t pay enough either, so I had to learn to program.

I learned on the TI-81 calculator that my school required me to have and after a few games on that I moved to mIRC script and Q-BASIC and then C++ within the year.

I realized that I enjoyed programming even more than designing and I programmed every spare moment I got, eventually making a complete replica of Final Fantasy VII’s battle system for multiplayer in mIRC script.

L. Spiro

I was five years old.

My parents bought a home computer (TI 99/4a, the first 16-bit PC) that hooked up to the television, so their children wouldn't be afraid to use computers, along with two books about basic programming. All of us fought over time on the machine, especially fighting over the game cartridges. I read the manuals as best I could (I was young) and while my brothers were away at school I wrote a program that cycled through all 16 colors. My 16-year-old brother looked it over, and replaced my roughly 45-line program with a roughly 5-line program. Then I was hooked.

They also bought a game programming book (Wow, on Amazon! Giving it 5 stars now...) that had 211 pages of 29 games. You had to type them in manually and each had notes about ways you could improve the games on your own. Being a kid with tons of time on their hands, I'm pretty sure I entered every one of them ranging from the 10-liners to the 20-something page monsters.

I furthered my humble beginnings by things like watching my older brothers play D&D and Gamma World, etc. I think I ran my first little GW campaign around age 8 or so, I was always filling up maps on the awesome hex-grid paper I stole from my brother and his friends. My life was filled with paper game designs and computer game designs and little graphic screen-saver apps like fire and lenses and other cool demoscene items from the late '80s and early '90s.

Learned Basic on the TI 99/4a, learned Pascal on the Apple 2c at my friend's house while constantly shuffling between floppy disks. Learned C++ on Turbo C++ 1.01 on a little 286. Things proceeded from there. Ahh.... nostalgia.

The very first program I had ever written was a LOGO program my teacher gave to the class to type into an Apple 2e when I was 9. I don't remember what it was exactly but it probably drew a square or something simple like that.

But I attribute my start in programming to being jealous of a classmate when I was 10. Our science teacher gave him an extra credit assignment to write a program that asked questions to determine what species of life the user was thinking of. It would print a question to which you'd answer Y or N and then be given another question ultimately giving you an answer like, "It's a mammal." or "It's a conifer." It almost sounds advanced except that the entire class had notes covering those questions and the final results. I took it upon myself to find a book in the library (internet not being widely available at the time) and learned the BASIC commands to write the program on my own. I didn't have a floppy disk to save anything on back then though so I don't think I ever wrote the whole thing out. But just being able to print something then get some simple input and branch depending on that input got my imagination going pretty good. I wrote programs with pen and paper for a couple years (i wish I never threw out those notebooks). I think I was 12 before I could save anything to disk or tape.

The first class I ever took that taught me something I hadn't already learned myself was in college, I think I was 19. I don't count a computer class I took when I was 16 in high school where the instructor hand fed you instructions without explaining them. That's fine when you're teaching a grade 4 class, not when you're a grade 11 class (though you could argue the 9 year olds were more interested and better behaved).

I guess I was kind of an imaginatve child. I liked to draw pictures, make new characters out of my toys, and imagine all types of stories. After playing on the Atari and NES, I started to think that maybe I could make games to tell me stories. I started to learn BASIC. We didn't have a computer back then so I went to my mom's office whenever possible because all computers with DOS had BASIC on them. I tried, but never made anything really good.

We got a computer when I was a middle school student. By that time, I had started studying C and buying books whenever my mom would give me money. I got Borland Turbo C and started working with that. Later I got the book "Black Art of 3D Game Programming and that taught me a lot of 2D and 3D concepts. It also taught me the math I'd need to later make 3D games. Eventually I started learning C++ and regular bought issues of the Dr. Dobbs magazine and got a subscription to the Game Developer magazine.

That's basically how I got started.

I loved to create my own stories since I was very little. I always did my own versions in my head of stuff I like (TV shows, videogames, movies, etc). I could (and still can) spend two or three hours in my bed, with my eyes closed, just imagining a full movie or a game, making everything up on the fly. I do that since I was 10 or so, almost on a daily basis (although now I just do it for half an hour at most, with rare exceptions). Yes, I'm kind of weird, haha.

Of course, after all that daydreaming, someday inevitably I tried to actually materialize what I imagined. I made crappy card cames, board games and random stuff just using pen and paper, then I moved on to filming lame shorts with my school friends (mostly comedy, we had tons of fun), and finally I moved on to game making software (those limited trial versions) making awful prototypes. I also loved creating stuff for especific games (I spent more time using the map editor of Age of Empires 2 than actually playing the game, and I played it a lot!).

Two years ago, when I was 20, I randomly saw a video of a japanese guy who made a game like C&C Red Alert using C++ and DirectX. Up until that point I didn't know crap about how games are made without relying on game making software, and that video caught my attention. Turns out there was a lot of info on the internet about game making, and I started digging just out of curiosity.

I picked C++ with SFML and started prototyping, and I loved the freedom, you can implement pretty much anything.

After some crappy prototypes, I started making a 2D open world platformer/brawler/whatever. It's been a year now, and I finished most of the under-the-hood stuff (a map editor, colission detection, all that jazz), and now I'm thinking of spending two more years to actually make the game. I already got the plot, the setting, the characters and everything in my head.

I'm having a blast so far, making stuff is very fulfilling. Even if your stuff is crap, it's your crap, and that's better than making nothing.

I was five years old.

And you were already rocking BASIC?! When I was five, I drew some of the worst MSPaint comics you could possibly imagine. Even 4chan wouldn't be on my level.

I started programming when I was 14. My dad promised to buy me DarkBASIC Classic if I succeeded in a history exam in school (I sucked horribly at history, still do). I got the grade, and my dad regretted it ever since.

Personally, I believe the best way to get into game development is to either mod existing games, or find yourself some kind of easy to use game maker, and work yourself up from there when you start understanding some key concepts.