Would love to hear some stories!! Did you learn anything with your first game dev experience? Any joys? Nightmares? Anything you'd do differently for next time?

Would love to hear it :) thanks for taking the time ♥

I've been playing around with making games for a really long time, but my first serious attempt at making something was maybe 8 years ago.  I picked an engine that didn't work out very well and bit off way more than I could chew, so the project just dragged on for several years until I got too fed up with it to continue.  I did learn a lot, but it was a disappointing end.

The first game I actually finished and released to the public was for a game jam, which was a valuable experience in learning how to scope and finish a project, even if the end product wasn't worth much.  I've now released five games and am slowly taking on bigger and more complex projects.  My goal is just to make things that I can be proud of and that hopefully other people enjoy playing.

The first games I made were in QBASIC for MSDOS.  I felt super cool making a 40x25 text-based puzzle game.  Then I felt like a loser when I jumped on the internet (this was way back in '95) and found a QBASIC site that had all of these killer games in 256 colors with sprites and 3D.  It was gutting.  I never did learn to do any of that PEEK/POKE assembly-ish stuff.  I always felt too dumb to understand it.  

So from then on I sorta use 'middle ware', which I guess nowdays is called 'engines' or 'tools' or whatever (stuff like GameMaker and Pico8).  My first project in something like that was actually a couple of pinball games made in Visual Pinball, which uses a customized visual basic script to control table elements and track events (like Bumper.Bump()  etc.).  I still hate most languages since they're text-based.  Where's all this processor power going?  I keep hoping there's someone who's like me and understands the fundamentals of how programming works but makes it powerful yet simple so game design is less about the technical stuff and more about game logic itself.  I was quite impressed with Arcade Game Studio's approach to AI scripting, where it used almost a music-type sequencer, with each row being a 'kind' of event, such as movement, turn on/off flags for collision, etc. and then the topmost row would jump to the different columns on events or set it to only happen for a certain amount of time or event.  It was so easy to just try out all kinds of ideas, mixing and matching a fairly robust set of 'baseline rules'.  

I went off on a tangent.  I'm hoping a dev reads this deep down and one day thinks about the problem of solving problems from different points of view.  I've never gotten on with 'coding' proper and find it tedious and boring...it's like being into photography and the only thing anyone else wants to talk about is lenses and FSTOP and such and you're like, 'I'm into framing and subject matter'.  It's not as if that other stuff isn't necessary, but in the end, if capture the subject matter properly, that's what actually counts to people you show the photo to, not whether you used a Nikon or Cannon.  No one cares. 

My first game was an RPG with 100 items and 100 quests called "Abandon Tomorrow" and it was a flash game released back in 2011 and got a nice reception, the only disappointment I had was regarding money, back at that time I was hoping to make 5k but ended up making only 500$ but note that during that time money did not come from sales but from sponsors, different system(there was a site called FGL were game devs got in touch with sponsors and they would auction for the intro publicity text from the game).

Looking back in time now, I regret NOTHING!