>>106381031
>>106382497
>>106382657
It really doesn't take that long to learn art.
Game engine development will take long if you don't do the learning in an efficient manner like learning C/C++ vulkan for a year and PBR renderer + ECS for another year. Two years is more than enough to make a decent game engine. If you want to have your own DSL and more QOL features, that'll add some more time but even that won't be anywhere close to a fourth of 20 years unless you are highly incompetent or doing things very wrong.
The same goes for art as well.
For 2D, you need to git gud at line art and colouring. If you mindlessly keep on drawing sketches for years without understanding and applying techniques like point(one or two) perspective, even 20 years won't be enough but when you do, a year of practice might be more than enough. Its also very hard to get lighting right and that requires a lot of practicing but with modern digital art softwares that are well capable of dealing with fancy blending effect for you, its just a matter of understanding the technique of adding base colors, light sources, highlights, edges, shadows, ambient light etc., all of which won't really take long unless you are slacking off and not practicing regularly or absolutely don't have a thing for art.
For 3D, its much easier because the tools do most of the stuff for you. You don't even have to worry much about
polygon count these days. And modeling tools have gotten so much better that retopologizing can be totally skipped with a single click using tools like quad-remesher. Though not as much as Z-brush, blender can handle good enough poly count for sculpting. Rigging, posing and even editing those poses in blender is so straight forward and easy to the point that the hardest thing becomes your artistic skills(on modelling, hard-surface or organic and animation pose blending) but not the ability to implement them. Again, if you do mindlessly learn them, it'll take way more time than necessary