I can't speak for OP, but I have a very similar experience:
I was introduced to ROBLOX in late 2008 -- my account was created September 26. I spent the first several months just exploring the platform. It was only a few years old at that point, and had just started the curve upwards on its hockystick graph.
The games were way simpler at the time, and they were genuinely made mostly by kids and young adults, and it showed.
One cool thing I discovered is that not only could you choose to open-source a world, you could publish individual models for anyone to make use of. I saw my first lines of code by grabbing a public model and looking through it to see how it worked.
My first forays into coding was pure "script kiddy": I'd take an existing script, stick it in a new model, and tweak it until I was happy with it. This was often things like taking a model of a sliding door, re-sizing it, and adjusting the script's `for` loop so it would slide the door the full amount I wanted.
I slowly figured out stuff like loops, variables, scope, and flow from that, without ever learning the term or reading a book. I was so engrossed that I asked for and received the Lua Reference Manual for my birthday.
I grew out of the platform's intended audience age early in High School, but I had already transitioned to writing python and making Java mods for Minecraft at that point.
I'm now almost 3 years out of college and doing embedded software engineering full-time. And it does really retain a part of that initial joy; I get the same rush when I write an ISO 8601 parser and see it spit out JSON to AWS, really!
Occasionally I'll log on and check things out. Games are a lot more polished, thanks mainly to the developer program that enables revenue sharing, so people can actually have an income from their creations. The studio and platform have also matured a lot as well. I remember when custom GUIs and dynamic lighting were mind-blowing features we sort of hacked together using tricks like a bunch of semi-transparent spheres anchored at a user's origin to simulate fog.
I was introduced to ROBLOX in late 2008 -- my account was created September 26. I spent the first several months just exploring the platform. It was only a few years old at that point, and had just started the curve upwards on its hockystick graph.
The games were way simpler at the time, and they were genuinely made mostly by kids and young adults, and it showed.
One cool thing I discovered is that not only could you choose to open-source a world, you could publish individual models for anyone to make use of. I saw my first lines of code by grabbing a public model and looking through it to see how it worked.
My first forays into coding was pure "script kiddy": I'd take an existing script, stick it in a new model, and tweak it until I was happy with it. This was often things like taking a model of a sliding door, re-sizing it, and adjusting the script's `for` loop so it would slide the door the full amount I wanted.
I slowly figured out stuff like loops, variables, scope, and flow from that, without ever learning the term or reading a book. I was so engrossed that I asked for and received the Lua Reference Manual for my birthday.
I grew out of the platform's intended audience age early in High School, but I had already transitioned to writing python and making Java mods for Minecraft at that point.
I'm now almost 3 years out of college and doing embedded software engineering full-time. And it does really retain a part of that initial joy; I get the same rush when I write an ISO 8601 parser and see it spit out JSON to AWS, really!
Occasionally I'll log on and check things out. Games are a lot more polished, thanks mainly to the developer program that enables revenue sharing, so people can actually have an income from their creations. The studio and platform have also matured a lot as well. I remember when custom GUIs and dynamic lighting were mind-blowing features we sort of hacked together using tricks like a bunch of semi-transparent spheres anchored at a user's origin to simulate fog.