I dropped out of high school in order to study programming more vigorously. It was the correct decision.

For you.

BTW b/c my school does not offer a programming course for 10th years or freshmen. I am taking cs50 from Harvard using edX. Though Im doing the course casually and should be done with it by December. I'm going to make the most out of high school :)

TheComet I am going to assume that was sarcasm

It was my life

For me, once I had a strong grasp of the basics (syntax and semantics, control-flow patterns, algebra, and a good sense of when and how to break big problems into a set of smaller ones), the best thing I did for my own learning was to start looking at, understanding, tearing apart, and expanding on code that other's had provided.

I was really motivated to make a Japanese-style RPG, so I started with code from a tutorial series that took you through a walk-around sort of demo. The code was around 16k in size if I recall correctly, so it was only around 400 lines of code I would guess. I dove in and read carefully to understand how it worked, and the first change I made was adding additional tile types. Doing that successfully meant touching 4-5 parts of the codebase (memory allocations, image loading, the map array, the rendering routine, and input (which directly tested tile indices to determine collision) -- it wasn't much on the surface, but it meant I knew enough to make changes and not break things. Over the schoolyear, in a few hours each night after classes and work, I steadily expanded this base to over 120k of source code, and had replaced or substantially modified the original code to the point where I was comfortable claiming it as my own (with due credit of course). In the end, I had added support for multiple maps, maps with multiple layers, made tiles and collisions more generic, added health/stats, added items and inventory, added enemies and battles, added a dialog system, added scripting and triggers, and had an in-game console where I could debug scripts live. To the side, I also had written separate programs to create tilesets, to create maps, and created a graphical tile editor (the following year, I expanded this tile editor of mine into a large-format image editor with support for all the usual image editor tropes, up to and including support for photoshop filters.) Between the RPG engine and supporting tools, I had amassed 10 or 20 thousand lines of code by the time I exited high school, and apart from the low-level blitting/drawing routines, I didn't use other libraries -- every feature I had coded myself, the scripting engine, the GUI system in the image editor, the flood-fill, the photoshop filters (this was all in 16-bit DOS apps written in QuickBASIC 4.5). The RPG engine had become so large itself that it would no longer compile while the quick-basic IDE was loaded (also a DOS program), so I found and learned to use a GNU Make-like system to build it from the command-line. I still think of this period and project as one of the times I learned most eagerly and productively.

So my advice is to get to grips with a language and environment first, and then to find something that's inspiring and probably only a few hundred lines long to disect and then expand and make your own. There's so much more available and accessible today than when I was doing this circa 1998-2002, and so much more community and help available, that you can probably even start with something more ambitious than I did, just don't choose something so large or complex that it confounds from the start and causes you to give up later out of frustration.

K Sorry Comet sounded very sarcastic to me. Ill strive to do something that allows for me to get the best of both worlds? Not sure if that is the right phrase to use

If someone comes up to you and asks what you're doing, tell them to leave because they are too stupid to be able to understand what you are doing.

I'm going to make sure I don't call people stupid. try

Don't neglect your schooling to program games.

Don't neglect your social life to program games.

I did exactly the opposite of this. Turned out fine. I graduated with honors and have a decent portfolio/resume now.

So I'm starting freshmen year or 10th year this Wednesday (yeah me). Also the gamedev game jam starts around Wednesday. So does anyone have any advice for high school and Programming in high school?

Hey. I know you said that you don't need luck, but good luck anyway! My advice...it's pretty easy to balance programming and school. Just treat it like one of your hobbies. Everyone makes time for hobbies, right? Also, do something that I never had the chance to do. Start your own club. Joining someone else's can be a pain and you might have little input in the club projects. Maybe it was just me, though.

Starting high school tommorow.

Good luck in high school itself--I hope that it goes well for you! ^_^

Went to the high school. Still here to type these words. Thanks for all the advice :)