As an Amateur, I struggle with being confident in my own code. I dream of building a game My friends can play but second guess myself.

For some context, I put about 7-8 months of work into a game, and made a lot of progress. I even rewrote the game from scratch 3 times, with each new version feeling better. It's a rogue like, in c#, using sadconsole.

Eventually I stopped due to burnout, but I'm gearing up to jump back into the project. However a nagging feeling of inadequacy is making me hesitant. I'm self taught, so I constantly feel like I'm doing things wrong, and I certainly am, but it's so difficult to have a sense of when I have improved, even marginally.

For example, the thing that drove me crazy was just building the logic behind all the file handling and installation procedures.

I decided to create a folder in my systems local application data using the path returned by Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment. SpecialFolder.ApplicationData).

Once I had that, I just created directories inside that folder which would basically just hold the user data and preferences using Json files. My project used Json.net so I basically store all player data and progress as Json files. I limited the available memory slots to four directories. I didn't want players to be able to create an infinite amount of new users for their install, so each of the four in game save slots just points to one of those folders and stores the Json there.

'Installation', feels laughable. The code literally just creates maybe 10 directories and copies an embedded master Json file for initial preferences and new game templates.

Everything worked fine but that's what is so unsatisfying. There's no way to tell if this is how I should handle the installation of my game because it feels so brittle and simple minded. Anyone could easily break the installation or corrupt it.

But as I researched more about this I found there are many different ways to approach the problem. Which made me feel directionless because I had no idea what the best practice would be – everyone had a different approach.

Has anyone else struggled with this feeling ? It's almost as if every decision seems completely arbitrary, because it's a simple game and there's no way to grind my teeth or see an obvious advantage in any direction. I could structure my application data 20 different ways, how do I find a way that feels professional?