First off, a little about myself. I've been drawing since 1993, started a comic publishing company in 1995, struggled until 2001, and quit the comic book scene in mid 2003. Then I switched to gaming writing in late 2003. What I've seen in independent/small-press comics is what I'm seeing in independent gaming making. No matter what industry you are in, everybody who gets into it is passionate, and they will spend there life savings and every spare waking hour either working on it or thinking about it. Gaming is no different. People dive in and write the code which interests them the most; whether that is the 3d fighting, or the 2d dungeons, or the magic graphical effects and explosions. Yet everything else they need to do to get the foundation of there game to be good goes by the waist side. In comics, new artists would draw main characters who are busty women, but you couldn't tell what's going on from panel to panel. In MMO games, there are great drop items from the dungeon monsters which makes crafting, and buying and selling completely useless. Many independent games don't have tutorials to help the new players. Big name companies are guilty of this too! Morrowind any one? I must have spent hundreds of hours trying to figure out that game and what the perks and skills all ment. Then turned around and spent three hours with each of my friends to teach them how to play it because it wasn't intuitive. We are all guilty of skipping the parts we either don't care about or don't know how to do including me. What am I saying?! Game writing is an art, like everything else, there is going to be tons of 'features' and 'help files' which will bore you or you don't care about. Although you can't make a game by only having the fighting and ignoring the rest. It does take some self control, but take a week or two and go back to where you started with the game. Update your original code, rewrite your code to make it easier for you to use and easier to expand. I personaly have re-writen my shop/inventory code seven times already and now it just takes seconds to add shops and new items or adjust item values. I admit, I'm not perfict, but most people I know can't make complex robust feature without starting with a few parts and slowly growing the code larger until you've got everything in it as you need or wanted. Finally, it's always good to be eager, but remember to go back and add all those boring features before your code becomes too complexand combersome.

To answer the last person, recently turned 29.

As for pin pointing a common error in beginning coders, I originally sat down to mention something that was bugging me something aweful but couldn't remember what the hell it was, so I tossed out another gem of wisdom.

There has been many'a day/nights I've forced my self to work on stuff that put me to sleep (literally). Coffee and soda's are bad for me, although, tea is a clean caffiene drink that helps to keep you more focused,... or atleast that's what I've noticed.