In my case, I didn't understand about the concept of data structures yet. I knew about arrays, so I had all of those arrays with the same indexing, and I kept on messing up insert/remove operations, causing the data to shift between entities and creating really odd bugs...

I didn't know that physics engines were a thing. My game involved bouncing balls off of walls, so knowing how collisions occur (angle of entry equals angle of entry with respect to the tangent of the normal of the surface) would have made the game more predictable. But for what I knew at my age (12) it was a big deal making a game like that, even if I was doing it entirely wrong on the algo for bouncing objects off of surfaces.

I didn't know anything about "real" programming, so my first game was built entirely in stagecast creator - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecast_Creator (which in hindsight, was a pretty great piece of software). Big downside is now I can't play any of that old stuff since the stagecast software has long since stopped existing.

I knew absolutely nothing. I changed the assets on one of the many templates, added some more game mechanics. And slaped a 17$ animation on it. then paid 80$ to submit it to Indie-cade. (It was the first thing I bought with my first paycheck). So I guess I'm a little excited to try again...maybe

via GIPHY

How much I didn't know!

When I made my first game I was cocky as shit, thought I knew everything just because I'd built a few levels in hammer-editor as a teen. Hooo boy I knew nothing about actually making games. I quickly learned just how much there is to think about even with a very simple platformer game.

I had a dude move left/right and jump up, and collide with seaguls which just moved back and forth. It was built in Torque engine and the whole game had maybe 20 seconds of actual content but it took us like 2 weeks to make or something.

I'm quite looking forward to this, although I'll probably only have time to devote maybe a week or 10 days of evenings to it.

Didn't know anything about functions, code duplication everywhere, memory leaks, crying orphans in the slums of memory without any pointer to rely on. And this was only a console game mind you.

I pretty much was learning how to code in C#/Unity3D, so most of what I implemented in my game was done after studying the engine documentation. Too bad that I hadn't been practicing, so I forgot some things.