As someone who writes code for a living, I've also helped people ship a few games (freelancing).
But trying to make my own 3D game from scratch is more often than not in a standstill, because doing the art is difficult and so is getting good at it.
Even something as simple as wanting to scale down my country's geography into 7x4 km chunked terrain presents problems - while the geological features are there, even with work on making the finer details look more realistic, I'd still need to make rivers that flow realistically from higher altitude above sea level down to it and then merge with the sea, which is easier said than done.
Don't even get me started on the idea of modelling, rigging and animating characters with complex finite state machines and whatnot.
Of course, a part of it is probably just managing scope and expectations (this project might take a decade without going full time to release something mediocre, even if learning a lot in the process), but it's pretty cool just how many details there are to the craft.
Yeah, I've done game programming and tried to make some on my own, but I'm just bad at art in general, and I've tried to get better a few times but my mental state makes it harder for me. Generally I've just used asset packs for my unfinished projects, or made ascii art games (dwarf fortress style), but I do enjoy hard-surface modelling sometimes. Floppy creatures are just hard to rig and animate and everything though, and I really suck at 2d art (though I do enjoy shader programming)
I have thought about trying to recruit one of my more artistic friends to make a game together, but then I'm bothering a whole other person to do a project that will never see the light of day haha
But trying to make my own 3D game from scratch is more often than not in a standstill, because doing the art is difficult and so is getting good at it.
Even something as simple as wanting to scale down my country's geography into 7x4 km chunked terrain presents problems - while the geological features are there, even with work on making the finer details look more realistic, I'd still need to make rivers that flow realistically from higher altitude above sea level down to it and then merge with the sea, which is easier said than done.
Don't even get me started on the idea of modelling, rigging and animating characters with complex finite state machines and whatnot.
Of course, a part of it is probably just managing scope and expectations (this project might take a decade without going full time to release something mediocre, even if learning a lot in the process), but it's pretty cool just how many details there are to the craft.