started first work in gaming at 28?!
I went down a different career path at first after flirting with some other jobs out of high school. In general I wouldn't recommend jumping right into a costly and time-consuming higher education unless you're sure you know what you want to do. If you just want to get the basics out of the way, aim for a cheap community college that you can later transfer to a full 4-year university once you have a good idea what you probably want to do with the rest of your life.
and isnt an art or computer art degree or whatever only a year or 2?
There are technical schools that are this quick. They're not really degrees in that they're usually not accredited programs. A BFA (Bcahelor of Fine Art) degrees usually takes 4 years.
Im starting to lean more towards level design, less animation more textures and building maps, something that sounds veryyyy apealing to me, like creating flora/vegatation to my liking or laying out the landscape like hills to creating an urban closed off battle place where balancing and thought is put in. I know interest change, and I have gone through diff phases were id want to do one thing and then a couple months later I change my mind, however this one has a unique spark to it!
You're young. Experiment with any interest that does pop into mind. You wont' know how you really feel about something until you've tried it.
If I were to take a direct path into level design is that such a job that I could makee a living off of? or do I have to be able to do a variety of things to get a longterm job.
Spend some time building maps or modding existing games. It's good practice, gives you time to decide if you really enjoy it, and helps build up your portfolio.
I'll echo both of the previous sentiments about degrees: they can be a help or useless depending on which companies and jobs you apply for. You'll likely need to do some research on the companies you're interested in and jobs you're interested in once you have a better idea. I wouldn't worry too much about it at your age just yet; just do your best in high school so if you do end up wanting to go to college you have plenty of options available to you.
what exactly is coding, and why is it refered to as a language, is it hard to learn, what are the types and what is coding used for?
You have to express rules to the computer. Just like expressing ideas to a human being is done through language, expressing ideas to the computer is done via language (though computer languages are not at all like natural spoken languages). By itself the computer doesn't know how to do anything of interest as it's just a glorified calculator. Coding (aka programming, software engineering, developing, etc.) is the act of telling the computer what to do to get all those things on your screen to appear to move and act and do interesting things. Game designers will sometimes do a little bit of simple coding (mostly just hooking up logic snd events, like spawning an enemy when the player enters a particular room) but all of the really hard/interesting stuff is left to the dedicated software engineers. You might try watching the introductory Khan Academy videos on programming to better understand what coding/programming is in general.
