Emmy, congratulations on your accomplishment.
Sometimes I spend some time in our chat channel talking to DC member Deozaan, trying to provide a little guidance on coding and trying to encourage the game players who hang out in the channel to work on writing games instead of playing them.
One thing i've noticed more and more with newer programmers is that they don't enjoy the "planning" phase as much as some of us older coders. I think this is partly a reflection of the situation that was in place when us older coders learned how to code.
In the days of punch cards and timeshared computing (before my time), there was very little interactive computing, and as a programmer you had to be dead sure your code was correct before even submitting it to run. So huge amounts of time were spent planning and analyzing your approach to make sure it was correct.
In my early days programming c, it could take hours to compile a large program, and i use to set the compiler going and then go have dinner(!) and come back afterwards to test the program.
I developed a true love of *PLANNING* a programming project.
In fact few things are quite as enjoyable as planning a large project -- it's fun to get out a paper and pencil and just sketch notes and data structures.
In face as the years went by and I find myself with less free time to work on all the fun project ideas I come up with, I developed a thing I call Virtual Programming. That's when I allow myself a few hours to daydream and plan a programming project in order to get it out of my head. Sometimes planning a project satisfies the strong urge to code it, and let's me let go of the idea and move on to other things.
All this is a way of me saying that:
Do not run away from big programming projects -- but also do not just jump into opening up your IDE and starting the code. Sit down with a paper and pencil and plan plan plan -- exerperiment on paper with ideas and figure out how you would code it, how you would represent the data, what algorithms you would use, how would you divide up the work, etc.
Planning can be one of the funnest parts of a big project.
