catch (Exception e) {
    Exception.autofix(e);
}

Done!

Why not just make a secondary ‘real’ email account that you use exclusively for signing up for things? Gets around those problems and gives you a way to retrieve recovery emails if you ever actually need to.

Ren’py uses Python (which is an easy to learn language), and has a lot of built-in functions that are specifically geared towards visual novels - text boxes, character portraits, that sort of thing. You can find a pretty good quick-start tutorial here. Ren’py is 100% free.

Gamemaker Studio is a very beginner-friendly (while still very powerful) option; it allows for a much wider range of projects (as it isn’t geared towards one specific genre, like Ren’py). It’s “free”; it uses a subscription model, but there’s a free “demo” version that (unless something has changed) you can use forever; the only substantial limitation is that you can’t compile a final game build with it… if you get to the point where you have something that’s finished and ready to publish, you can subscribe for 1 month to their premium license, compile your game, and cancel it. It has options for actual programming, or a “drag and drop” interface, where you’re basically building your game logic using ready-made “blocks” that you input data into to tell the engine what to do. It’s pretty intuitive and a good place to start. There’s a wide range of tutorials here.

Depending on what you want to make, there’s a few different options:

For old-school SNES-era-styled RPGs, RPG Maker is a viable coding-lite option.

For visual novels, Ren’Py is pretty easy to pick up.

For mobile games, Corona is pretty slick (and free).

For general purpose 2D game development, Gamemaker Studio offers a drag-and-drop, “coding-lite” option as well as actual written code, Godot is a powerful engine but complex to learn, and Unity is a popular engine that, while not really optimized for 2D, can function as a 2D game engine, with the downside of being a bit overkill, and being very unfriendly to folks unfamiliar with writing code.

My son got started around 12 or so in Game Maker Studio and it was a pretty easy introduction to game programming. Unity is also a great option, and would be a better choice if he’s interested in 3D games at all. Godot is a great option, too, but with a caveat: It’s conceptually very different from GMS or Unity, and he may find it more difficult to pick up. It’s a very powerful engine, though, for both 2D and 3D, and it’s completely free.

TI-83 graphing calculator in high school, around 1998. I would sit there in math class coding games in Basic. Ended up developing a reputation as the guy you went to if you needed a program to cheat on a math test.

The highlight of the entire endeavor was a class wherein the teacher announced that before a test, they’d be resetting the memory on everyone’s graphing calculators, to prevent cheating. I wasn’t planning to cheat, but I did have a few games I was working on, and I didn’t want to lose them, so I wrote a program that emulated the graphing calculator’s interface, and would let you go through all of the steps to reset the memory, including showing the Programs menu as being empty afterwards, while not actually resetting anything.

I showed this to the teacher just before the test (demonstrated “resetting the memory” with the program running, then demonstrated that the memory was in fact not reset), and he backed off from the compulsory reset policy in favor of the honor system, because he conceded that he wouldn’t be able to verify that the memory was actually reset anyway. Made me feel like an absolute hero.

It’s honestly funny because I learned the concepts in the math classes a lot better as a result of this - it took a very thorough understanding of how to use a concept to write a program to solve it for you.