I'm just an around basic/medium leveled programmer and decided to make a partially complex game for a class project. Now, my teacher has basically the same skill level I do so he asked his brother, the expert programmer, for help, and I got back a whole bunch of things that make hardly any sense to me.

To give a little background about what I am actually trying to do, and where I asked him for help with.

It is a labryinth type game, where you move around trying to reach the exit. He told me to use the graph theory, which I do slightly know a bit about from math, but have no clue about for vb. The maze itself is a 5000x5000 pixel map, with the characters I use to represent the player being 50x50 pixels, so each square is 50x50, resulting in a 100x100 square map.

1. I have an 9 slot inventory with 5 possible items a person can get. He told me that dynamic programming it would be too hard, if finding the items were to be random, as I had originally planned, so to use static. He said I may have used double-linked-lists, which I have no clue about, and then he said to use a stack for my item list.
"Also it would be best to use a stack for your item list. You will then have a function that uses the system clock and random number generator to create a number. Pop an item off of the stack and use the random number generator to define which square the item will be assigned to. Loop through this till the stack is empty"
And then he said to use a list to store the items, set to size 9, so when it is full, it will say I am full on items.

2. I wanted to have random events happen in the maze, like pit traps and fire traps, he said that it would be best to keep the pits static, and to do the fire traps dynamically, based off the system clock and random number generator. What would be the coding for it to happen every step or so?

3. An event list. It would display the 4 most recent events happening, with any event after that, simply dropping off the list. He told me I can do it very easily using a heap, which I have no clue how to properly implement. He said to use a counter that increases every time an event is added to the heap, and when it reaches 4, decrease the counter then pop off the top item, and add the next event, and increase again.

4. Movement using arrow keys. He told me that I would have to use scroll bars to properly do what I wanted, but to instead, just use a graph, and when an arrow key is pressed, check if there is a wall, which I have no clue how to do, and if there isn't one, move the person in the matrix, and refresh the screen.

If you could help me, it would be greatly appreciated. I want to have at least something done out of everything he told me to do before I go back to ask him about everything thing else since I had no clue what was being said. And then he also said that to make it truely impressive, store the items in a seperate file. He said "text would be easy, but xml is the way of the future", to make it so I don't have to compile everytime.

So yeah, if you can help, that you so much, if you can't, I'll try my best to do as much as I can, which won't be very much, before I am forced to ask him for simpler instructions, or a nice 15 page sheet telling me how do everything...