My first experience was back during the summer before my 7th grade year. My best friend at the time had learned a little bit of Game Maker from his older brother who was actually working in the industry. So we had decided to get together and make a little fan game called Super International Fighters. It was supposed to be an expansive version of Super Smash Bros. but included characters from several different games. So we got a little bit done on it, but never really worked on it after that.
A few weeks later I went to my dad's in Missouri to spend a few weeks. Since he was usually gone till 3 PM, I'd spend the mornings figuring out Game Maker. I started working on a little Sonic game that consisted of about 5 rooms and your goal was to simply reach the end. Then I took the concept a bit further and worked on a Megaman Battle Network-like game but took the more traditional Megaman style and made it a side-scrolling platformer. It had a few bosses with the addition of a secret one as well. I continued to work on some simple little projects after that.
About November-ish of that year I was browsing through GMC and came across a pretty elaborate Zelda engine that someone was working on. That person was also a member here, unfortunately I can't remember the name. =\ He decided to quit working on it and released the source code. So I picked it up and starting messing with it. At this point I was using mostly the drag and drop action in Game Maker to do my programming, but now seeing this engine with mostly scripts I actually started getting more and more interested it. So I started adding little bits to the engine and eventually wanted to add the Lens of Truth to it. That's what led me here.
I had been on the site before, but never actually registered. Wanting help for figuring out how accomplish the Lens of Truth effect is what made me register. So I stayed for a while and began browsing and posting learning more and more and more and more. I eventually started working with thegoldchuchu on the Wind Waker Advanced project during my 8th grade year and kept going on Zelda fan game development.
After that broke up I've pretty much kept to myself as far as my projects go. Not really going to far into completing a game, but learning several different concepts and more about programming languages. My sophomore year I took C++ for a full year, a semester of Visual Basic last year, and now I'm in AP Java this year. Most recently I've been more on web development and my website as well as coding a website for Chaotic Athletics (which totally bombed, by the way). Even more recent than that I started working on a project that I seriously want to go through with in XNA that I will reveal soon. ;]
As for why I got into development and games, it's pretty much because of playing video games. Ever since I was little I've known that game development is what I wanted to do. Not until a few years ago that I figured out what part the process I wanted to do. So yeah, that's basically my whole experience with game development.
I'm totally going to have to go back through and see if I have all my old shitty games and upload them here. xD