I want to eventually make a video game, or be part of a development team, but where exactly do I begin making the game?  First you can't make the game without the game engine but how would you know how the game engine should work if you don't know what sized sprites your going to use and how many of them without drawing the graphics first?  How do you stay attentive drawing the graphics?  I've been working on an animation of a girl dancing for about a month and I only have 9/12 (I might even need more than 12 for this, but I don't know yet) frames done.  How do you make an game engine anyway? (I'm thinking of making this game for either a Sega Genesis or a Super Nintendo)  How do you come up with a system of designing the game that allows you to do EVERYTHING?!  I have a lot of crazy game ideas that don't involve just having enemy sprites walking on a non-moving background layer.  For example, having a wall in the background crack and then the ceiling collapse on you, you can't achive with just the "sprites on one playfield background" kind of engine.  It wouldn't work because it will require the top of the background to be turned into two backgrounds and the second will be also as much as part of the game as the first background.  So how do you make a engine/system that does everything you want it to do?  What about compressing graphics?: If you do all the decompressing before you start the level you might run into RAM limitations; if you do real-time compression you might have som miserable slowdowns (unfortuanately, a lot of Snes games relied on this method, I heard from someone); and if you don't use compression you might run into ROM problems.  So what will be the solution?  Have a giant mess of different strategies, strategically chosen for all the different characters and items and stuff.  But there is two problems with that:  1) How do you know what strategy to use if you haven't drawn all the sprites and counted how much memory all this takes up?  2) How do you make an game engine that lets you use whatever kind of compression strategy whenever you want it?  Anybody who could solve all my unorginized confusion, thanks in advance!