Getting REALLY frustrated making this hangman-type game

[KyZu]

So I started learning PHP a few days ago and I sort of dived right in trying to make things, this was my first program (a simple BMI calculator)

http://pastebin.com/SHfA4pt5

 

Okay but now I wanted to make hangman, and I'm just...so lost, like, I don't even know how to go about it. Here is the code I have so far (some of it commented out because it was just "ideas" I had). Here is what I have so far:

http://pastebin.com/FyQPmR8U

 

So can somebody give me some direction? Is there anything I wrote that is REALLY dumb and unnecessary? Basically I'm trying to find a way to:

- log the guesses (how can I do this if I don't have an array, or nothing to put the values in...do I need to duplicate anything?)

- check to see if a guess has already been made

- replace the underscores with the letter corresponding to that position.

 

and hell I don't even know what else, just trying to get it to work

[ignace]

You need to store it using sessions, so the value persists for the duration of the game.

 

session_start(); // MUST be at the top of your script

if(!isset($_SESSION['increment']))
  $_SESSION['increment'] = 1;

echo $_SESSION['increment']++;

 

If you run this script you'll see the value increment every time you refresh the page. The value of 'increment' is persisted between requests.