You seriously got started in one of those Mario level maker programs?
TL;DRWill describes starting programming around age eleven in a simple game-maker program, making a crude nanobot shooter by copying and tweaking event code until something worked.
Absolutely. I had this game. No one's allowed to copy this. I had this game idea when I was about 11. I wanted to create a game called Infection, where you were essentially a little nanobot flying around in someone's veins shooting viruses, was my concept. Anyway, I spent a very long time in MS Paint making 2D backgrounds of veins, I guess, and this little ship that would fly around. And then tried to make that happen. And you could just about move around. We had, we, I had this, it was we, I didn't have a studio at 11. You could paint the map down and then you could paint a magenta overlay to show where you wanted collision to happen. So there was no real physics. It was just if you hit the magenta, you bounced back sort of thing. And it was tacky and horrible and terrible. But that was the first thing I did.
In one of those programs, the games that let you make other games.
It wasn't a game as such. It was made by some other young guy. I think he was like 15 or 16. And it was made in Windows Forms. So it was a real program. And the idea was you used one of those GameMaker-y, Scratch-y sort of programs. You used event blocks to trigger stuff happening, but you could go in and look at the code behind those event blocks, which I think was in C. And so I started copying events and changing little bits to try and make it do something similar. I had no idea what I was doing, but I just experimented until something worked and pestered the guy who made this game maker far too much.