I'm a little old.

I liked video games as a very young child. Naturally I wanted to make my own.

We didn't have the Internet because this was the early 90s, and my parents didn't think it was worth the hassle.

The computer we had did have BASIC on it , and it had some help files. I think I got a book from the library, too, but I was too young to really do well with books written for adults. I made some progress making some games, mostly text adventure style, but they were incomplete and messy like you'd expect from a kid. A kid with no Internet to look things up on, too.

High school had some programming classes. They were pretty okay.

Then in college I hit the trope where the smart kid who never had to study finally hits difficult material and doesn't know what to do. Woops.