Comment by MattRix

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.