I'm about to start working with a friend on a Dr. Mario-like game. This is his first complete game, but he's a pretty bright programmer. I've written a Tetris game so I am going to show him how to think about this type of game from a programming standpoint. We're doing this in Java w/ Swing, BTW. I'm teaching him about the MVC paradigm and the Java graphics classes. Beyond that, I don't know much to explain about it besides just showing him how it can be done. I want him to come up with lots of the ideas on his own, but I don't want it to just be me asking him questions and telling him whether he's right. At some point I need to break it into components and have him work on them independently. Any ideas?

Yeah, maybe I do have it figured out. Thanks for the reassurance.

If anyone has any stories about mentoring people that would be great too. Even a link to a good site w/ good stories would be good.