When I was a teenager, I imagined that after a decade or two of working with computers, I would be able to write a computer game over a weekend. Or maybe two weekends. I had a notebook full of ideas and sketches, so that when I am ready, I will make all those amazing games.

I even made a few (quite simple, from my today's perspective) games in Pascal during high school and university. I expected to become much more productive over years of practice.

That didn't happen, for several reasons.

First, my expectations for a good game have increased. I don't want to make the most complicated game possible; I am perfectly okay with 2D raster graphics and simple algorithms. But I expect a good game to have animations, sound effects, at least ten levels that feel different, and an option to save game progress. My old games barely had half of that (some were animated, some had ten or more levels, only one had both of that).

Second, things became more complicated. It is no longer "320 x 200 pixels, 256 colors". Windows are resizable; different screens have different sizes. Programs need to be aware that multiple threads exist. Sometimes there are many possible choices, and I get paralyzed by choosing between them. Programs are expect to have installers; it is no longer enough to have one EXE file, and optionally a few data files together in a ZIP file. It felt like every time I mastered something, a new problem appeared to be solved.

Third, as a teenager I didn't realize how much my everyday work would differ from the kind of work necessary to make a computer game. Some skills are transferable: I am more comfortable with using threads, parsing data files, writing algorithms, the program architecture in general. But many skills are not: if my dream is to make a desktop application, then e.g. all the web frameworks that I have learned over those years are useless for this purpose; and they have cost me a lot of time and effort. So from the perspective of making computer games, as an adult I maybe learn in five years as many relevant things as I have learned as a teenager in one year, when I had lots of free time that I could dedicate to this goal.

Fourth, life gets in the way. There is much less free time, and much more things that I need or want to do during that free time.

So here I am, after a few decades of IT jobs, and (a) I can't really make a complete computer game over a weekend, and (b) it's irrelevant, because until my kids grow up I probably won't get a free weekend anyway. Or rather, even the rare "free" weekend (when the kids are away) is spent on other things that have higher priority.