I have a feeling that I would like programming games better if... I knew what the heck I were doing.

I have a feeling that actual game programmers aren't really just winging it while they're making their fancy $50 games. I'm not really sure where exactly I'm supposed to learn how to structure my games, I just have a faint idea of what would be organized.

And while I'm trying to figure out how to structure everything (I'm bad at planning ahead on paper, I overlook so many things) I'm also trying to figure out all these bugs and how things work (btw, if you are having trouble with strings... make sure you put "using namespace std;" in there before main. I always forget, and it fooks me up).

I just need to work on one engine and then use that to make games for a while, grf. And of said engine, so far I have a map loader. I don't know if it'll be efficient... it's just a class with an array for each "tile code" (which graphic the tile will have), and a screen maximum width/height, current w/h, etc. Basic stuff...

On another note... how the heck am I supposed to structure my map files? I could kind of do it like you load veritces in an obj file where you have all the data about a tile on one line, but what I've been doing is have the map saved twice (in one file). The first x tiles are the bottom layer, and second x amount of tiles are the top layer. Messier than doing it the other way, but eaiser to save and load.

Grf. I'm hungry.