On: My first six months of programming: from man-roden...

[eru]

Have you tried reading other people's code?

There's Knuth Literate Programming version of the classic Adventure [0] which you can read almost like a novel, and the source code for Spelunky [1] has also been released [2]. (I don't know whether Spelunky has good code, but it's a good game.)

Good luck!

[0] http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf [1] http://www.spelunkyworld.com/ [2] http://spelunky.wikia.com/wiki/Source_code

[chipsy → eru]

Spelunky is made in Game Maker, which lets you script on top of a pre-existing engine and IDE. It's hard to apply to "bare-metal" coding.

I would point to open source games such as Nethack, Stepmania or Battle for Wesnoth for some ideas.

[eru → chipsy]

Nethack is probably a mess. Battle for Wesnoth sounds like a good idea.