As an experienced dev but who hasn’t done any game dev since my teenage years (I’m 40 now), I can say that getting anything that meets my standard for “this is worth showing to anyone” is really high and I’ve spent dozens of hours working on a few games and don’t really like any of them yet. But it’s been a lot of fun. The open models and an RTX 5090 can crank out models that are good enough that Astra can clean them up in Blender and get you a pretty good asset pipeline. But good looking assets do not a fun game make. That requires a lot of patience and small tweaks to get something that feels fun. But if you want a full 3D game with ray tracing and beautiful HDR visuals and particle effects, that stuff is easy.

There are three kinds of people:

- those who needlessly reduce things to binaries

- those who articulate nuanced positions that tend to confuse and bore people

- those who lose the plot entirely by making self-referential meta-points

I'm on the verge of strategy 2, because I've been doing strategy 1 and financial pressure keeps derailing me.

My heart's not really in it though. Would be a lot more convenient if it was though.

The latter is definitely the challenge.

Someone who's played a lot of games and can keep iterating seems like not always a bad thing.

You're forgetting one (I think people do this deliberately because they dislike AI, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt): those who are passionate about games and skillful, and can ship higher _quality_ at the same pace as before.