I had tried and bought gamemaker a long time ago, and it started slowing down when I tried to do bezier curves, after trying to use less complex equations, it had 0 impact on performance. After further testing I realized it didn't matter if you were just doing 2+2, a few hundred commands was all it took to destroy it. I think I moved on to other projects, some musical, some animation, and I don't even remember what I had in mind when I did the google search that day, but I think I was about to start trying to learn to program c++ and directx to do it...yeah, I think I was going to learn the darksdk(from darkbasic), and I think I just said, "there's got to be something like game maker, but better", and typed something along the lines of " game making tool" or something, and the rest is history. Bumpmapping?! Pixel shaders?!, physics)!... I knew I had found something special by the time I was done with ghost shooter, but i had no idea how much it'd change everything. Not just from a game design standpoint, but like the course of my life, basically.
Similarly strange in retrospect is that learning c++ which has similarly opened up new opportunities to pursue was just by the smallest chance. I think I had looked at the sdk tutorial for a moment at one point, had no idea what the hell was going on, and wrote it off as too intimidatingly out of my league, but by chance I asked a question in chat, and soljah boy suggested I try the sdk. I hadn't the slightest consideration of the sdk as an option, and I told soljah boy i knew barely anything about programming, he told me someone who had made a plugin said the same thing, can't remember who or what plugin...but damn. Providence...and by providence I mean dumb luck