Comment by lifeinthevoid

I’m not OP but I’ve been doing game dev for 15 years professionally for the same reasons you mentioned. I’ll be honest up front though, it’s not a great field if you’re going into it trying to make money, but it can be incredibly satisfying.

As far as how long it’ll take, that depends on what kind of things you want to make and how much time/effort you’re willing to put into them, especially on the visual polish side of things.

The hardest part of learning game dev is learning how to program, and it sounds like you already have a good foundation there. The current tools, especially Unity and Godot, are very quick to get up and running with. You could learn the basics in a dozen hours, and be making (bad) games in less than a month. Game design is a skill that is hard to learn except by doing it. Reading books and watching youtube videos about it only goes so far.

For making games that you can actually sell, you’re looking at spending months per game, usually at least 6 months… though often the games you think are going to take 6 months often take much longer!

The number one tip I would give is to actually finish your games, even your little early experiments. In game dev the “last 10%” takes way more than 10% of the effort.

> non-trivial content

You mention "3D animation" and "game design" as areas of focus.

For the former, there are established learning paths, so perhaps quite easy to estimate when you'll get to a point where you're delivering industry-standard work.

For the latter (game design), perhaps the answer is a bit different. If you study game design at, say, university, the learning path might be a combination of reflective practice (studying games, writing critically/analytically about them), prototyping, making a bunch of games (including the final major project), and doing lots of experimentation (and maybe also going deep into a particular unexplored game mechanic, world building, character design, etc).

Even if you finish university, you'll still have to make plenty of games to hone your craft.

And the, for both of these areas of focus, to actually stand out from the crowd, would require something special. Maybe innate talent, maybe a new way of seeing the world. This is difficult to estimate.

(But perhaps you've been sculpting 3D models and making small games in your spare time anyway, and maybe you're already quite good, so who knows? :)

> charge for my work

You're competing with a lot of other people for gamedev work :-) Most gamedev programming jobs don't pay as well as other programming jobs. You'll be doing it for the love of it!

Someone I know worked at a gym, but made games in Unreal in their spare time, then did a 2-years remote masters in indie game dev, and got a job as a technical artist at a small indie studio. AFAIK he still just uses blueprints. I don't know how long he spent before university working on games in his spare time, but the 2 years of fast-tracking his knowledge really helped.

If you want to combine your interest in programming and visual creativity, but still make money, may I suggest front-end development? Whether it be web stuff or mobile, there's a lot to chew on there plus it pays great.