I'm not sure if I'm entirely bored of it, it's just I feel like I can be doing other things that might lead to me being more successful.

Your brain says: "This guy have been doing this stuff for X year, he has put in huge amounts of energy and time but still its not getting us anywhere. Im gonna give him bad feelings while hes doing this stuff so hes gonna move onto something more productive eventually."

-you need to finish things. Writing an engine and all your own stuff is just a little portion of making a game.

-scale down your projects. Not after youve finished your current projects!! Start a new one right now. Something you can finish in 2-3 months completely. The menus, the audio, sounds, physics, art, gameplay, levels ....everything. It doesnt have to be perfect, it doesnt need a stable engine ....it just have to be finished.

(If at first it feel like that game would be a huge regression compared to what you expect from yourself and what you are capable of ....thats normal. Do it anyway)

the wanting to do everything from scratch when it comes to gamedev with C++ doesn't really help me with getting things done quicker

-now you know this already. so you dont have to keep doing it. Now you need to get your motivation back so do the necessary and fun parts from scratch and for everything else get prewritten stuff. Dont keep saying: "Yes but I trust my own more. I want to understand and know exactly how it works. My own would be more flexible. I feel like Im cheating with this. etc"(or maybe you are doing it for other reasons. Im just guessing)

-you said you are not good at planning. Planning and managing your time and projects is fun ...but you cant choose big projects and you have to enjoy the little victories.

-maybe instead of creating the tools and stuff that make the game possible, work more on the game itself, ...like the levels and the art.

-dont focus on money and success. If you dont enjoy making games now, you wont enjoy it when you are making money and "success" with them.

-yes, you are in a rush. You cant make all those great games + write your own everything in 2 years. Im not saying you need 5 more years of hard work then you`ll be able to do bla-bla-bla. Have fun with it now. Scale down your projects and finish them ....that way you`ll see your own progress.

-you shouldn give up gamedev but maybe you need a little rest from it and/or a huge change in how you`re seeing and doing it

You didnt say what are your longterm plans with gamedev. Do you want to get a gamedev job after the university or do you want to make money from your own games?(Not that I knew that when I was 17, Im just asking:D)

Read these articles, they might help + they have great info:

http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/1136623767/finishing-a-game
http://www.david-amador.com/2011/03/so-where-is-that-motivation/

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/181864/The_9_common_mistakes_every_indie_game_studio_should_avoid.php#.UPLxQif7Iad

I can relate to this topic very well, and I can share bits of my story:

Game programming has interested me ever since I got my first computer. At the beginning of high school, many years ago, I started learning OpenGL and more advanced graphics techniques. With a few friends, we started a very ambitious first person shooter project with very little experience. I thought I could implement all the fancy stuff I read about, such as per-pixel lighting, dynamic shadows and so on, even though these were emerging techniques at the time and robust implementation was very challenging. The focus started shifting more and more towards making a 3D engine, not a game. I wrote a lot of code. Not having a good idea of how things will eventually connect, I often ended up with a bloated and non-inspiring code base. Then I rewrote all. Then I rewrote all again. And again.

There were many times when I just fed up with not completing the engine or a game and I decided to stop. Designing and programming games, however, always kept lingering in my head, and eventually I have returned to the topic.

Two years ago, after having some break again, I decided that I will start a new 3D game project and I will keep it small and finish it. I wanted to have something complete to show that I can do game programming. The project is still under active development, but I managed to keep it graphically very simple at the beginning, and actually wrote a lot of game related stuff. Then I succeeded in having a playable version running, before starting to add fancy graphics. This is what I should have done many many years ago. But I think I learned a huge amount of stuff and I learned what it will take to implement certain techniques. So when I started this particular project from scratch, I had a pretty good idea how things work.

I guess that the thing about game programming and programming in general, that keeps me being interested in it, is that you can be creative. You can come up with some cool idea, design it, code it and when you get to see your creation, the feeling can be very satisfying.

The other thing, that pinebanana also brought up, is deciding the level to work on. There are so many game and graphics engines, that making your own from scratch can be difficult to justify. Of course, if the aim is to learn and if the game does not need that much technology, making most of the stuff yourself can still be reasonable. But to me it seems that saying "I made this game all by myself" might carry a different weight depending on just how many libraries I used or if I used an existing engine.

I'm not sure If it is a problem for any of you guys, but to me it has started to be increasingly important that a code and a program is usable after, say, 10 years. It seems that 3D graphics schemes and API:s evolve at a huge pace, so ensuring future compatibility can be difficult. If I doubt that the code might not compile or the program might not run in the near future, this is a major discouragement.

I think it would help if you were to do a project in which you're not taking the lead. A project with a leader.

From what it sounds like, you're setting your own goals and projects, then being disappointing when you don't have the motivation to complete it. If you were to take part in more projects where other people tell you what to do, where you have clear goals given to you and you KNOW what you have to achieve, where you can see the end result you will be getting from the project, then you may have some solid work to your name and will not have the motivation issues you are having because you will be more dependent on other people. Particularly at your age, you will learn a lot more this way and be much more efficient.

So for now, leave it to someone else to worry about all the details you mentioned, and just enjoy being in a game dev' team instead of dumping all the pressure on yourself

You sound just like me right now. Personally I feel for ya, and wonder if maybe it's just that time of the year when people loose interest and feel a little down. Right now I am pursuing a career in law enforcement, I think for the time being that will be more rewarding to me. In the future I plan to come back to programming with a new fervor.

Heck yeah I know how you feel
Best advice I can give is to start a new project, and make it small. Not Hello World small, but like, Tetris small. But probably not Tetris, because that's just so overdone as a beginner project that it would feel like a chore to make.

Would working on multiple projects at the same time be a good idea?

Yes, definitely. That's how I did my demo... didn't quit my RPG because that would be too depressing. Just add the demo as a quick side project that I can get done in a couple months for a morale boost (and hopefully some prize money in a compo on gbadev.org... which I did, but mainly due to a poor turnout in the demo division).

Also, Nypyren is right. Even if you don't actually finish your big project, and do rewrite the base of it multiple times, it's not wasted work because you're applying your improved skills every time (which means they have improved... and that's the goal, right?). Eventually you'll have that stuff so internalized that you'll be able to whip out the base of a game so fast, you won't have to worry about using libraries

The main problem I have is just getting all the niffy details in my code to be completed. e.g. font rendering, which is a pain in the ass to do (still haven't actually implemented it).

Are you using bitmap fonts, or trying to do scaleable truetype with outlines and anti-aliasing and the whole deal? Getting bitmap fonts rendering is really easy, at least if you can just blit a rectangle from the font image onto the screen anywhere you want. On a system like GBA, it's either really easy if you use the native 8x8 tile size as your character size, or really hard if you want variable width characters and/or height not equal to 8. But that actually makes it a lot of fun for me, devising techniques to use the hardware to its maximum potential. But bottom line... anything you dread doing, just get it working in the most basic usable form possible, and go back to it after the actual gameplay is done.

Another thing I should mention... I always have been and am to this day, highly resistant to using other peoples' code in my projects. IMO, libraries should be nothing more than a hardware interface. SDL is excellent for that. I don't even use its blitting functions for 2D stuff... just shove my own software rendered backbuffer to the screen at the end of the frame. But it also provides openGL functions, so it's great for 3D too. GBA and DS are even more fun, because the hardware is fixed so you can interact with it directly, no libraries at all.

I'm also big on game longevity. I want it to be as immortal as possible. Thus, cross-platform support is a big thing (again, SDL is great because it's so minimal), as well as open source. Consoles like GBA are even better, because you can write an emulator for it on any kind of computer you want.