I remember learning to code in Game Maker a while back, so each time I had an end goal in mind: the game I want make. In that time, I made 8-10 crap games, but each time I would code, I would more and more swap out the pre-build code actions with actual code as the complexity of the games increased. Besides the fun of making games, it was great discovering the underlying code, even if it is something as rudimentary as Game Maker's scripting language.
Wow! This is how I learned to code too! I remember when I around 12-13, I wanted to figure out how to make my own message box in Windows (yes, I was weird). But I didn't know there was such a thing as "programming". In fact, I had no idea how software was made.
Eventually I stumbled upon Game Maker -- I think it was at version 4 when I found it. So I began creating little games with that cheeseburger icon and snowmen. Eventually, I realized that this thing called GML would let me do more. When I looked in the help file, one of the functions said to enter an "argument" and I seriously spent like 2 days trying to figure out what an argument was.
Eventually I got a Mandelbrot fractal going in Game Maker and discovered C at that point.
Wow.Straight from Game Maker to C? Sort of happened the same to me. Up until uni I only knew Java, Game Maker and basic PHP/MySQL then started with C in freshman year. Although I mostly do web development these days, I liked working with pointers and memory management in C (once again delving down deeper).
