Starting with Scratch is also a nice option. The start is very fast, you can do the “arrow up moves forward, arrow down moves backwards, arrows left and right rotate, touching the bomb kills you” in a few minutes. You could learn from YouTube videos, your own experiments, and the games other people have published.
At some moment you will outgrow it, and move to Python or Java or C/C++. That is another lesson: you don’t need to stay with one programming language your whole life; actually you shouldn’t. Some things are optimized for beginners, other things are optimized for experts, use the one appropriate for the level you are at.
Learning from YouTube videos is something I have underestimated most of the time. Yes, YouTube is a waste of time, and videos are unnecessarily slow. But it may be a good idea to watch programming videos if you are tired and want to relax. Most things you already know, but once in a while there are some useful details you didn’t know.
The problem with HTML and Unity is that they keep dragging you in a certain very specialized direction that may not be relevant for most of what you want to do. HTML is about web pages, but even if you want your game online, you probably only want to paint on canvas, and respond to key and mouse events; 99% of HTML is useless. Unity is about 3D movement and collisions, which is nice if you want to make a 3D game, but unnecessarily complicated for anything else.
Starting with Scratch is also a nice option. The start is very fast, you can do the “arrow up moves forward, arrow down moves backwards, arrows left and right rotate, touching the bomb kills you” in a few minutes. You could learn from YouTube videos, your own experiments, and the games other people have published.
At some moment you will outgrow it, and move to Python or Java or C/C++. That is another lesson: you don’t need to stay with one programming language your whole life; actually you shouldn’t. Some things are optimized for beginners, other things are optimized for experts, use the one appropriate for the level you are at.
Learning from YouTube videos is something I have underestimated most of the time. Yes, YouTube is a waste of time, and videos are unnecessarily slow. But it may be a good idea to watch programming videos if you are tired and want to relax. Most things you already know, but once in a while there are some useful details you didn’t know.
The problem with HTML and Unity is that they keep dragging you in a certain very specialized direction that may not be relevant for most of what you want to do. HTML is about web pages, but even if you want your game online, you probably only want to paint on canvas, and respond to key and mouse events; 99% of HTML is useless. Unity is about 3D movement and collisions, which is nice if you want to make a 3D game, but unnecessarily complicated for anything else.