You're not really practicing if you are practicing what you mastered a year ago. At best, you are keeping your skills sharp, but you're not growing. And learning new stuff is difficult and daunting. A lot of times, that thing you don't know can be very intimidating because you don't know it and there doesn't appear at first glance to be a way to learn it. But you dig (usually google) until you figure it out and then code it and it works.
It really boils down to whether you can say you know something (even just one thing) that you didn't know last week about game programming. What specifically a technique is is hard to say because it can vary to the extreme and it's different for whatever subject you are trying to learn whether it's 2D game programming, 3D game programming, baseball, race car driving, playing guitar, etc. With playing guitar it could be things like learning a new chord you didn't know last week, learning a new rhythm you didn't know last week, or learning something that would be more accurately termed a "technique" like palm muting. Skill might be a better term than technique.
But the bottom line is, "Are you better and stronger at doing it than you were a week ago, even by only as much as knowing one thing more than you did last week or being able to do one small thing you couldn't ever do before this week?" If the answer is yes, you are growing. And if you grow like that every week consistently, after a year you know will know 52 things you did not know the year before. After 10 years it will be 520. Those things add up especially if they are as broad as "I learned how to use vectors for keeping track of rotations and directions.
You want to take something you can't do at all, spend a few days figuring it out (because it should be something difficult enough that you have to spend at least a good 4 hours learning it - I'm not referring to trivial things), and then a day or so doing it until you feel confident that you understand it completely and could do it again. What specifically it is is not as important as that it's something that makes you better at your goal and that you took on a difficult to moderately difficult challenge and over came it.
I guess Im pretty much stuck. The pong I did, was like a year ago. After that, curiosity got the best of me. I wanted to know a little bit about opengl. Thats where I started learning Opengl through this website . I learned a lot. Took me like 6 months to get to the whole tutorial. The breakout game from was a translation from that website but base on my understanding. But one thing is that I felt confident I can understand some low level code now compared to me last year so i guess thats progress no matter how slow I am. But I cant really say I am growing every week as I am too slow really. Seriously I feel like I am the slowest programmer. I feel like I have to complete my project first before learning something that I really dont know about even though theres a lot of things I really dont know that I have to know to become better. Soon I will start learning 3D. But I have some 2D projects I got to make first. Its a personal thing, I got to prove to myself before I go to 3D :D
You think im still in the right path here?
