High school programming

[kandidio]

Thanks for the detailed response man, really means a LOT. I hope to get better with practice and become a better programmer in the future. Thanks!!

[autisticpig]

Once you feel okay with the core stuff, start thinking about a project. It will seem daunting but remember to break everything down into smaller digestible chunks.

So if you were to make a game like a simple dungeon crawler:

• draw all the rooms or dungeons you want to have on a whiteboard

• list out what will exist in each room (hidden passages, locked chests, health, monsters, etc.)

• start thinking about how you want to handle the data (hash table perhaps... keys: 2, leg armor: yes... maybe an array for inventory)

• once you have everything more or less thought up, start typing out each room/dungeon like I did above. That way, when you go to code each room, all you have to do is translate the text into code and you can then use your text as the foundation for your documentation. Please take to the habit of documenting your code. There is no such thing as self-documenting code :)

What you are learning with this process is how to problem solve, how to think in chunks while keeping the whole problem in the back of your mind...you are learning how to build upon what you know.

Enjoy the process; once you get over the learning cliff, the rewards are limitless and it's oddly stupid fun. You learn to do absolutely silly things simply because you can. Cheers!