GameDev: Where to Begin fliers - Part 1

I feel before anyone decides they want to program games, should not even attempt at making a game (unless you are the artist). There is a reason this is not for everybody if you, the reader, just shuddered at the thought of stepping back that far in just learning C++ or some other language to recreate your own version of Microsoft excel.
Beginners often see a program and a game as a separate thing, therefore feel as if making a platformer or RPG must be individually learned and will only think in programming basic "templated" genres.
Before anyone makes a game, create a program that will take in a list of people with various bit of information (age, gender, birth, etc), a program that generates bunny rabbits that walk around on a field, their own program for drawing pictures, or a program designed to simulate flowers populating a field. Basically, don't make a "game", make a computer do something useful for you! This eventually becomes ideas for games later since you now have experience with designing and building your own mechanics. Otherwise, designing games like Space Invaders or Rock Paper Scissors will seem like Star Trek to you because you don't TRULY understand what it is that you are using (this is me, speaking from experience).

Once you start thinking of games as nothing more than interactive programs, you start to realize that the term "video game" can be far more abstract that just making a platformer. Sure, there are games that worked, there are even colleges that teach you "game design" and people will tell you there is only one or two ways to make a game good (until Minecraft came along of course). Anybody and everybody knows how to make a game already, we've done it since we were kids (e.g. flashlight tag, catch the leaves, jump the farthest, knock the other off the log). Making video games is the same exact thing; only instead we are giving a list of instructions in which an automated machine plays its role as game master; that is the only "hard" part.

Don't take it harshly or feel as if suddenly making video games or programming is not in your blood, this stuff just takes work and like any puzzle it takes figuring out. In any programming project, you will walk in not knowing what to do. The idea of programming is having a tool belt and running into a wall filled with all the things these tools are used for until the wall is gone.

So, you wanna be a programmer for games? Look up programming exercises! These helped me out, I just wanted to share some of my experiences and understand during my self teachings in programming in order to make games, hopefully Moosader will also help you as she has helped me. :]