you shouldnt program a huge game until youve mastered most of the coding. if you cant code a little simon says game, you arent ready for rpgs

I disagree with MRide and Skuller972. I think it's a bit of a generalization actually. Of course it is not recommended to start with a large RPG project as your first ever program, but it doesn't mean you will fail. If you start small enough, you will succeed. It won't be the best RPG but you can still do something decent to practice. My first calculator project ever was a RPG and it succeeded. It was not that great, but the 3 other calc projects I had were RPGs too (Illusiat 1 through 3). I personally always found it harder to code anything else than RPGs because with RPGs, you don't have to worry as much about speed. In the walking engine, all that moves around is your character. Everything else is turn-based. If you do a real-time game as your first project, good luck getting a decent framerate. Besides me, I also know other people succeeded with RPG/adventure games as their very first project. Krid and tr1p1ea are examples and Krid did a much better job than me at a first BASIC RPG project.

What I would say is that a good RPG project takes a considerable amount of time to work on and lots of memory. So there, I redirect to rule #1

i do #16 for almost every program i write that takes longer than 48 hours, or programs that have very few "global" variables. in my mind i call them important and unimportant. the tags global and local are more professional though. you also may want to add onto that to have a separate section of variables for subroutines. you don't want to have a subroutine storing values to X and Y and then have it call a subroutine which also stores values to X and Y, unless it's part of the code.

Also, in regards to Rule 16, if you run out of variables you always have the Finance variables to use, though they are two byte tokens (I believe).

Also, in regards to Rule 16, if you run out of variables you always have the Finance variables to use, though they are two byte tokens (I believe).

Correct.

Sorry, but the Finance variables to me seem like too much of a hassle for me to use regularly...

I really like the finance Vars, because they are really fast, even faster than Ans.

[Raylin] Rules edited in.

Some drawing and graphing commands set it to zero.

Because, if I remember this correctly, it is part of the OS's routine for graphing or something and can easily be overwritten by the OS. Or something along those lines.

Edit:
Double ninja'd.

Sorry, but the Finance variables to me seem like too much of a hassle for me to use regularly...

Ya, I know. I don't like using them either. I was just saying in case you run out of normal variables then you always have those as back up.

Just tested, you can.