How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

Like the author, I got into creating Runescape bots for a bit - but never works to sell them, just made my own for fun and (in-game) profit.

As I dove deeper into the world, I came across people who would purchase a monthly VPS and install botting software on it. There were plenty of guides on how to go through - but no easy solutions for those who weren't technical.

Realizing I had an opportunity to capitalize on this - I built up a hosting company dedicated to the Runescape botting niche. Each VPS would come pre-installed with all the required software and make it dead simple to begin botting within 5 minutes or so.

At my peak, I think I had over 100 dedicated servers each running anywhere from 4-16 VPS on them. Some of my customers were using it to level up their personal accounts, others were running gold-farming operations.

The business was fairly passive, and I learned a ton from the experience. Things eventually came crumbling down when the creators of Runescape broke the bots (This would happen on occasion, but things would be up and running within a day or two normally) for a long time. I had to shut down as all my customers left overnight.

My own path was to start dancing, a tough one like argentine tango, since it requires full mental awareness. Which in effect means that you always come home with a grin from side to side. This will be true with any form of activity that actually makes you focus.

You always have the rest of your life ahead of you, it's up to you to make something meaningful out of it. Don't set out to find a partner but rather your passion (that involves other human beings not computers), and love will find you. And as others wrote, it's a bit of luck involved, but you have to give luck a chance to strike you.

I guess it's never too late, regretting stuff is always a downward spiral.

Racing Sims like Assetto Corsa have a decent sized modding community with people designing and coding new car models, modifications to the physics/handling, audio packs, tracks/maps, etc.

Flight Sims are the same, and lots of other Simulator games.

As for open world games... Skyrim, GTAV, Empyrion, Space Engineers, Terraria, Starbound, are all moddable and have thriving communities.

Then there's the entire Steam genre of moddable games: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Moddable#p=0&tab=TopS...

Modding is very much alive and well. I'd suggest just finding any of the above games that interest you and having a play with the mod system. I find it a very entertaining and interesting way to learn more about programming due to the specific constraints of each game.