Thanks for the welcome! @ feneur I'll start there then. JavaScript is not out of my reach @ quantumstate I have to leave almost all of the game development jobs I find alone, because the only way for me to build a game is to use C# and XNA. Which is not too popular among clients, especially since most of 'em want stuff for Android and iOS. Windows Phone 7 is out of discussion 99.9% of the time, and if they need something for Windows... well, I'd rather stick to utility apps for now and leave game dev for later. I could have tried a tutorial, but it's my favorite thing to optimize and try better and better solutions for a problem. Too few tutorials discuss this. So, I've decided to start looking for open source projects. See how they're made, and learn stuff. I'm planning to take a look at some other open source games in the nearby future, especially Arx Fatalis now that its sources are free. Hope this explains what I meant by 0 A.D. helping me with my work I am most interested in the AI and the engine optimization. Seeing it run at native 1080p (there were no options, but I didn't notice the resolution change) without any traces of lag on my laptop (not a top notch machine) made me think that I have a lot to learn from it. @ Gen.Kenobi It's not really heaven here either, but I'm not too stressed. Even though I have lots of trouble at math (I'm expecting to get a 7 out of 10 in the final exam ), I'm a straight 10 out of 10 student at programming, which represents 75% of my college admission rating. The competition is not that harsh in Romania at the moment, if you know what you're doing. You can easily distinguish students who are interested in learning from those who are not. To put it simpler, the average student that finishes a math & informatics high school isn't able to fully implement a doubly linked list w/o the teacher's support. People say it's the teachers' fault but I say it's the lack of interest coming from the student. My teacher isn't a top teacher. I learned the basics from her, but immediately afterwards I started advancing through computer science on my own. Because I was interested, that's all it took. During the last year some changes occured in the whole schooling system here in Romania. Most of the changes were about exam security and overseeing. Basically, they made sure students are unable to cheat: they increased the number of overseers, the number of cameras etc. It was a country-spread disaster on the students' side: there were lots of high schools in which no student was able to get more than 5.00 out of 10 and pass the exam. Thus, it's even easier to get to the top if you actually want to.