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Tried learning Python with a game project, ended up breaking the whole thing instead

I spent last weekend making a simple text adventure in Python. Everything ran fine until I added a loop for user choices, then the whole game just crashed on launch. Turns out I forgot to close a bracket inside a nested if statement. I learned that even one tiny typo can ruin hours of work, especially when you're new. But it also made me realize how debugging forces you to read code line by line, which actually helped me understand the logic better. Now I'm wondering if it's better to build small things and fail a lot, or follow tutorials step by step to avoid these messes. Has anyone else had more success with one over the other?
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simonh74
simonh745d ago
Failing a bunch is how I learned too, it just sticks better when you break stuff first.
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terry_carter15
That nested bracket thing got me my first few times too. I remember spending four hours tracking down a missing parenthesis inside a for loop in a little calculator script, and when I finally found it I felt both dumb and relieved. Here's my question - when you started that debugging, did you find yourself going in circles adding print statements everywhere, or did you try something like commenting out whole blocks to narrow it down faster? I ask because for me, the first approach just made the mess worse until I learned to isolate the broken section first.
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holly_walker76
@simonh74 nailed it, breaking stuff makes it stick way better.
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