>>714979481 (OP)
I've spent almost 8 years now self teaching myself how to make games while working full time in real estate finance.
It's an ADD disaster of jumping between skills that each take significant time to master. Concept art, Character Design, Environment Design, Composition, Color Theory and Texture Art are plenty to master just with 2D design alone.
Move into 3D and you've got just for characters: modeling, sculpting, retopology, UV unwrapping, texturing (hand painting, or procedurally with Substance), rigging and ultimately animation which is it's own huge rabbit hole of difficulty and complexity. Not to mention the environmental assets making each rock, grass shrub, tree, building and prop to fill a whole world.
And after working for years and years to get good at all those dozens of specializations, you've still got to learn programming and the tons of complexities within even an "easy " engine like Unreal. Character controllers, animation blueprints and syncing your animations to gameplay, state machines, behavior trees and all sorts of different enemy AI approaches, saving and loading, physics, and that's before we even touch on possibly including multiplayer or networking.
Then there is sound effects, music, particle effects.. it just never ends. Not to mention all of the game design, worldbuilding, story and more.
Making games is a monumental task and it feels crazy that people attempt to do it on their own. Nobody makes movies or TV shows alone. But games and tech make it possible for the truly insane.
Despite making probably 200+ prototypes and never finish anything I truly love it and enjoy mastering each various part of the craft. Maybe someday I'll finish a game. I'm getting good!
