Background to starting Athura

I am going into my Senior year in high school with a year of computer science under my belt. This was from a basic intro to computer science course. We learned Java and Python, but it was basic syntax of if, for, while loops. I was really interested from the start and wanted to continue. I liked python from the moment I opened the interpreter because of its simple and easy to use designing. When we transitioned into java I learned much more about the language than I did for python, but I found it clunky and it seemed like it used a lot of unnecessary syntax's and semicolons and labeling. We used java a lot and I read quite a lot on the syntax's and uses of methods and classes in Java. After the year was done I was looking for something to program over the summer. I had been drawn to python so I read a little bit about the language but I never got into programming anything large because I had no ideas of what to program. In my opinion I feel that the best way to learn a language is to do a bunch of small projects so that you can find out what you would need to learn to implement into your program.  You see all of the flaws in your programming skills and it also gets you much more involved and motivated. Also for me it helps me to remember the syntax and the quarks of the languages if I type it a bunch of times and visualize how it affects the program. I was looking at some tutorials online and was looking for something to program, but they seemed too easy or stupid. Eventually I decided to program mastermind which is a game where you guess a code generated by the computer. It was rough to say the least, I didn't know how to use classes and a lot of the program was hard coded. Although it was a rough design, it helped me to learn a lot more about the language. I used pygame, which is a module that you can use for python to help with graphical interfaces. I wanted to program something that looked nice. For several weeks of stumble through the computer science world I was asking my friend how he was doing and what he was keeping himself busy with. He told me that he learned XML and was programming a roguelike. My memory was a little fuzzy on what a roguelike was so he filled me in. I  was instantly interested in the genre. I got rogue and played it for several hours and looked up the basics of the game. I learned about a ton of features and functions of python that I had not known about before. It was the boost of motivation and intrigue that I needed this summer.