I was in 10th grade when I built my first real project — a game called Mesh Ball, made in Unity.
No one assigned it to me. No class, no teacher, no deadline. I just got curious and started building.
I didn't know C# before this. I learned it because the game required it. That's the thing about building something you actually care about — the learning doesn't feel like work. You hit a problem, you figure it out, you move on. That loop of curiosity and problem-solving is still how I learn best today.
The game made it onto the Play Store. For a 10th grader, that felt enormous.
Then I lost it.
Google started sending warnings about privacy policy compliance. I was young, I didn't fully understand what they wanted, and I was already getting pulled in a new direction — web development had caught my attention and I threw myself into that. The warnings piled up unanswered, and eventually the app got removed. The project files didn't survive either.
No screenshots to share. No live demo, no GitHub link. Just the memory of building it.
But I don't think that loss diminishes what the project meant. Mesh Ball taught me that I could learn a programming language from scratch and ship something real. That belief carried me through every project that came after it. The video websites, the sidebar components, the portfolio — none of that happens without this game first.
Some projects don't leave behind code. They just leave behind the person they made you.