I am quite a good programmer, and yet, not practicing that much those days, I found myself mainly stuck with stupid problems of data format.
How the heck am I gonna implement my sprite class, and my map files, and how do I organise my source files so that I have a nice working environment, and extension is actually possible, etc.
I spent ages designing the actual implementation of my data format (actually, most of the year), and somethng like a week to actually code it in C++...
Planning AHEAD is good. Spend ages on the paper is good. Tons of scrap notes, rough design, graphs, etc, can help, and is much much less frustrating than typing lines of codes, delete them, lines of codes, delete them, etc. It seems tahn most people would rather stick with a faulty design, try to fit it, make with the problems and think "well, at least it''s working", rather than start again from scratch.
you''re an amateur, that gives you the advantage than when something is wrong in what you are doing, the only person that is gonna suffer from it is you, and you only have to be blamed by your conscience, not by your boss, you colleagues,etc.
So don''t hesitate to be self critic, and especially, be honest with yourself. If you can''t be honest, you are starting on a bad basis... it''s the same problem as "drawing the line", when designing, there is somewhere where you have to say "stop", and jsut stop adding and adding, thinking that anyway you can do it. Be realistic.
Oh, and never give up, if you know why you wanna do this in the first place
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