After re-writing some functions and commenting them thoroughly this time (you know you're a moderately decent programmer when only 10% of your code is actually code,) I had an odd revelation.

Design is hard.

Now this might not be new to most people, but it's new to me. See, for me, I find programming kind of easy. There's a line at point you simply don't have the tools to do something, because you don't know how. But before that, everything else is pretty much just figuring out how to implement things. It's fairly simple, as long as you know what you want. You wish to achieve a result, and you work to achieve it. It's slightly messy work, but it's all basically one great big logic puzzle.

Here's the thing. I like logic puzzles. I really like logic puzzles. I've always liked them. Primarily because the solution is.. well, logical. It's how my brain works. Now design, design isn't like logic. It's got logic in there, but it isn't entirely logic. I'm just now starting to realize that, contrary to popular belief, NOT everybody can just be a game designer. It's a very difficult skill to learn. I'm almost ashamed to admit that this kind of shocks me. I always assumed it was a very simple skill that just required the right frame of mind, but it's not. It's really, really hard.

This doesn't so much disappoint me as encourage me. But it still comes as a surprise. Perhaps despite how much time I've spent studying it all, there's still a lot I have to learn.

'Till then.