Back in the day, after learning QBASIC I got hold of a copy of Dark Basic somewhere -- roughly a proprietary basic language for windows with bindings for input,

Back in the day, after learning QBASIC I got hold of a copy of Dark Basic somewhere -- roughly a proprietary basic language for windows with bindings for input, sound, graphics and so on. Apparently these days it is open source: https://www.thegamecreators.com/product/dark-basic-pro-open-source https://www.thegamecreators.com/product/dark-basic-pro-open-... After learning about arrays I got very excited and cobbled together a space-invaders game in Dark Basic with particle effects where all simulation data was stored in one giant table. Pretty amusing in retrospect. Arrays sure beat having to hand-name each variable in code. Dark Basic was great. Also a good playground for doing little 2D physics games / simulations. It was a lot of fun to do this at the same time as learning highschool trig/physics as you can actually use this knowledge to build something. After that I went down the C/C++/OpenGL/DirectX spiral and didn't produce anything playable/useful for years (engine development, hah). After that I went down the early Java-era path and was able to start making playable application again (memory management + a standard library - oh my). edit: these days i write/maintain python applications. i tried python + pygame for game development a few years ago. honestly python doesnt seem like a great language for game development. e.g. how do you actually ship an application? all the py2exe style approaches to packaging/bundling are essentially hacks. pygame didn't seem like such a performant/easy framework for input/sound/graphics etc.