Before I really got into programming starting when I was very young and would sometimes draw mazes and then run around pestering people with them, trying to get people to figure them out. I had an interest in games or at least creating entertainment for others.

When I first really used how to use a computer I drew some simple maze games in photoshop and put them together in hyper card. This image is a reconstruction of my memory of what the first thing I did looked like.

When I was older my parents bought me this awful 2D Role Playing Game engine that I fairly quickly picked up on. It was unsupported and very rudimentary, it was sort of dropped in the middle of its development. For a long time I struggled with it and eventually got halfway through a few simple games like super simple hand drawn style rpgs, a top down tank shooter, and eventually an rpg with actual pixel art graphics that never got anywhere. Because I was around 13 at the time and just learning, compounded with the horribleness of the software I was using, these games never got anywhere and didn't make much sense.

Sadly I've lost all the data from these old projects so I will attach a screenshot of Secret of Mana 3, which was the inspiration for my pixel art game. I actually got some tilesets and levels done that looked similar, but obviously not as good.

Near the end of this stage I was modifying some existing games made with the Torque engine like Think Tanks, and I created a tic-tac-toe variant puzzle game with the RPG engine I was using, which was really pushing beyond it's limits. I was past ready to move on because the tool I had was limiting me, but I never found anything that didn't require a quantum leap as far as programming understanding was concerned.

Then, gracefully, Unity descended down from the heavens on a beam of light. It was just what I wanted and needed, and I got started right away.