3Doofus, the docs are weak, yes, but this is just about as straightforward as a programming language can get for game-making. As far as experience goes, it's true that a lot of us are more experienced, but you've gotta practice to get there--we've all put in our time doing stupid little things like making a white ball bounce off the edges of the screen. We've all done the "Big Bertha" style target game to practise physics. We've all done the "guess a number" game.
It's fairly basic to write any of the above examples, but you're still looking at a good number of lines of code to do it--and to be honest, if parsing keyboard input is posing this much of an obstacle to you, you need to set your sights a little lower for the time being. I'm not saying this to be mean or snide; rather, you're going to set yourself up for a whole lot of frustration unless you start out by tackling very basic, boring, move-stuff-around-the-screen stuff.
I strongly recommend you pick up a book or two on game making if you haven't already. I've heard good things about Maneesh Sethi's books (http://http://www.maneeshsethi.com/), though I haven't had a chance to check them out myself. Even when it's made simple, making a game is a lot of hard work and requires fairly extensive programming skill.
Good luck, and do check out some additional resources!
Tom
It's fairly basic to write any of the above examples, but you're still looking at a good number of lines of code to do it--and to be honest, if parsing keyboard input is posing this much of an obstacle to you, you need to set your sights a little lower for the time being. I'm not saying this to be mean or snide; rather, you're going to set yourself up for a whole lot of frustration unless you start out by tackling very basic, boring, move-stuff-around-the-screen stuff.
I strongly recommend you pick up a book or two on game making if you haven't already. I've heard good things about Maneesh Sethi's books (http://http://www.maneeshsethi.com/), though I haven't had a chance to check them out myself. Even when it's made simple, making a game is a lot of hard work and requires fairly extensive programming skill.
Good luck, and do check out some additional resources!
Tom