Basically my game dev history can be broken down into 3 periods:
Late 1980s - Early 1990s
I followed the instructions to make a lot of games in QBASIC, but many of those games were very basic (pun intended!) and I didn't really understand the programming language itself at the time. Also I remember seeing ads and articles about Digipen Institute of Technology in issues of Nintendo Power, but the cost of going to a school like that and the math involved scared me away from that route.
High School and early College years (late 90s, early 00s)
Not sure which year it was, but I took a QBASIC class in High School. The class itself didn't teach me much, but I learned a lot by taking other QBASIC games and modifying them and reverse-engineering them to see how they worked. In my spare time I started making an RPG (with graphics) based off of Robert Jordan's book "The Eye of the World". Things were going well until I hit some critical error and I couldn't find a solution.
2019
I found my thumbstick with all my old QBASIC programs on it and found that I could run them with the new QB64 version of QBASIC. By this time of course, there were a lot more tools available for indie game development. So here I am!