This is more of a rant, but not a rant (if you know what I mean?). Lately, well not that lately, I've been gradually losing interest in game development (specifically programming; I can't do art... so yeah), more and more. I don't know what it is! It's very frustrating.
Perhaps, it's the amount of work that I do that turns out to be quite useless and I have to re-do it all over again. I just keep failing. I just want to know *everything* about game-development, I want to understand how it's done from the ground up. Yet I can't do it! I mean, I can, but I always get distracted, or annoyed at myself because I just can't think of an appropriate design in order to achieve a task. For example, I'm making my own very simple renderer for my game, built in C++. I know I'm leaving half of the stuff out that I could put it in and that annoys me, e.g. texture options (whether to clamp or repeat the texture) or abstracting OpenGL specific stuff (such as Texture classes w/o GLuint directly in them, more data oriented of a design). I REALISE that I could use another engine, like Ogre3D, or whatever, but whenever I do try to use it, I just hate the way that it enforces you to do things their way (plus I find it somewhat awkward programming with someone else's code, unless I've studied it and frameworks like Ogre3d takes awhile to study). But anyway, my game is 2D so I thought why not use OpenGL by itself (probably going to use legacy code because I haven't really learnt about shaders). Another thing, I've made my own entity system, which I know I can really improve but it just gets all out of hand when I try to.
Now, I'm only 17 (last year of high-school this year), didn't turn that too long ago, but yet I want to make money via programming, and the only way that I can think of is: 1. Game Programming and releasing it on the Android/iOS app store (or selling it via a website, 2. being a freelancer programmer (yet most of the skills/experience I don't really have), or 3. Being the next Bill Gates (haha, I'm hilarious). I also want to be somewhat known, and I also want to know a lot, sometimes I just don't have the motivation to learn about new stuff, either that or I'm busy programming.
Hopefully I'll be going to University after high-school, I want to get things done before then though, but before then I want to COMPLETE my projects that I've started, which is hard. I've made a list of what projects I'm wanting to make, but I'm not entirely sure if I'll ever them all done. I'm terrible at planning (the wanting to do everything from scratch when it comes to gamedev with C++ doesn't really help me with getting things done quicker). I've been working on my game for quite some time now, barley got anywhere near completed. (I've got a window open)...
Has anyone ever felt some-what of what I'm feeling? Does anyone have advice for me? Should I be in such a rush to get things done at my my age? Or Should I just give up, and move onto something else? Such as: programming applications with Qt, web programming, or perhaps security penetration testing (i.e. ethical hacking), or whatever else. I'm just not sure what I want to do when I'm actually a programmer, I love low-level stuff, but I'm not sure.