5 - Programming

One of the greatest family experiences I've ever had was learning to program. In intermediate school, I have a friend in art class who introduced me to an online game that was just starting out: Roblox. I decided to take him up on his offer to plat around with him. That was honestly one of the best experiences of my whole life! I had previously done very little in terms of social media and my typing skills were very lacking (I hated race the kangaroo in Elementary - it always got me triggered.) From Roblox, I made a ton a great online friends and that was the defining moment when my typing speed increased at least five-fold.

After a year or so of playing and meeting some amazing online friends (some of whom I still contact to this day,) I became extremely interested in the scripting aspect of the game. I thought that if I could simply make a block appear or make it move a notch without a character pushing it, my life would be so much better. So I quickly commenced in my learning... from a terrible Roblox Lua scripting API! Wow, when they first started up, they had no idea what they were doing on their wiki. So this is where my brother (one of them - I have 3) came in. I earnestly pleaded with him basically every day at that point that he sit down with me and help me script level ideas I was just bubbling with excitement to script. Within literally about a week, I had learned a top of programming skills and had created a map called "dodge the fireballs" by yn56p - go check it out if you play that game (I play Minecraft instead now), I never updated it from its humble beginnings - and the creations didn't end there.

Soon afterward, with my brother helping me learn new topics along the way (and just to put it out there, he had never programmed in Lua before, but was teaching me it anyways because it is so basic and similar to other larger languages,) I created a large scale game with over 10,000 lines of code (oh my goodness, I didn't learn good organization until later) that would allow admin players to customize and run a game with user friendly on screen GUIs, and the game would create the chosen map and put power-ups in it and run all of the math to determine who had won on various game modes - tag, capture the flag, free for all with lives, hide and seek, Battlefront 2 style 'capture the bases,' zombie apocalypse, and I'm sure I'm forgetting more.  I absolutely loved every moment that I worked on that game, and every successful line of code made my day! I had a lot of days made at the time. I followed that project with various fun testing sorts of things, like hover cars, path-finding AIs, and lots of various small tests related to making the large scale game I mentioned a moment ago. It was a blast.

All along the way of this programming process, and most importantly in all of it, my brother was there teaching me how to create any new things my mind came up with. That relationship continues to this day. Even today, my brother is the first person I go to with a question about programming, and he always delivers.