Recently I've been teaching myself game programming with python and pygame.

Most things are greatly simplified by python and pygame, but not everything. Some of the harder things I've had to learn are how to use Bresenham's Algorithm for field of vision. In a nutshell, it resolves the difference between a direct line between two points (theoretically of zero width) and something made up of pixels of a fixed width (or in my case, tiles of a fixed size.) I can give  Bresenham's algorithm two points and get back a list of the squares in a grid that will form the shortest line between those two points. From there, I can work through that list, checking for something that obscures the line of sight between those two points, and stop as soon as I find it (throwing out anything that can't be seen due to the obstruction.)

Another difficulty still remains ahead and unsolved: creating art and music and designing levels. See, for now I'm building little demos to teach myself each new concept (incrementally introducing new things into my existing "ecosystem" one at a time), but I'm working towards a smallish game I already have in mind. 

At work the other day, my coworkers and I were discussing any video games we've recently played, and one coworker mentioned that her husband had picked up "Ninja Garden" -- she meant "Ninja Gaiden", of course, but the idea of "Ninja Garden" was just too amusing to pass up. So that's where I've started now.

My idea is this: you are a ninja, sneaking in and about a guarded garden. You have to sneak past the guards to a certain level goal (you see now why I needed to implement field of vision correctly). 

This requires me to have the artistic ability to come up with background music (sound effects are not a problem, I've got an awesome little tool called sfxr that simplifies that significantly) as well as all the images in the game. Currently, my demos have all involved a random cheesy series of images I found on the internet for the level backgrounds, triangles for the enemies, and this friendly toaster I threw together in about 20 minutes with a bizarre frame of mind.

This is the "fun" part -- I've made the game act right, now I have to make the game look and sound right.

This won't be pretty.