Hrm… I suppose I spent 15 years making other people’s games first. >_< More seriously, just start with small stuff. Make a simple 2D game with a something like the Love framework or Pico8. Then try to scale up a bit or use something a bit more powerful. If you are really want to make a game solo, then the best thing you can do is learn to control your scope. You’ll never be able to be good at every part of making games, so figure out what parts you want to work on and figure out how to make a game around those skills.

You also don’t have to make do it alone. You can hire out art, programming, sound, music, writing… really anything. Most “solo” devs do that to some extent. Also try and seek out your local gamedev community. Asking online is fine, but you’ll get more out of an in person conversation with someone who’s done it before.

Lastly, game jams. There are smaller game jams going on all the time, but the big one is the global game jam in January. I’ve always liked that one because there are always new people. In my experience, fresh gamedevs are always perfectly welcome. You’ll have someone else on the team that can rough out the structure for you, then you just need to apply what you already know as a software developer to fill in some blanks. People also like to do role bending at jams too. Programmers will try making art, artists will try making music, and sound people will try programming. Jam games are usually bad, so nobody will expect anything you make to be any good, but people generally have a blast doing it anyway. :) I like to rope people into making NES games every year because even as experienced game devs they are so sure they can’t write C code, let alone for something 40 years old, certainly not in 48 hours! They do just fine once they dig in. :D -> https://www.slembcke.net/nes/

Yeah, I make a comfortable living doing software, and having kids didn’t work out. So I give out a few hundred bucks a year spread across the likes of Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, and some one off donations to smaller projects that end up saving me some time. Free software costs me more than proprietary software. Haha. (Well, unless I factor in the software I use for work… Then not even close O_o)

I get the impression that maybe the money sent to Mozilla might be a waste though. :-\

Eh, guessing from a distance or playing favorites won’t be better though. Like I might get grumpy about a C-level guy or investor getting more than their “fair share”, but marketing for example is still an important job done by people that aren’t paid gobs of money. Without the ability to let the people that would buy it know about your product, it effectively doesn’t exist. We all love the story about a game that came out of nowhere, but that’s the exception, not the rule.

Depends on what you want to get and how you use them. I have racing drones with batteries that only last 4 minutes, and a few planes that last 30-60 minutes. Lipos haven’t improved radically in the last decade, but they are a lot better than nickel batteries from a few decades ago though.

Ah racing yeah. I had a friend that was into that, and it seems to get pretty spendy. I do a lot of scratch built planes, so it’s quite a bit cheaper I think. Even a “spendy” store bought plane tends to only be $200 - $300. Racing drones cost about as much, but I don’t really race them, and rarely break them anymore.

RC stuff, but only kinda? My dad got me into micro helicopters about a decade ago. I now have several dozen planes, drones, helis, etc. Not to mention multiple RC radios, batteries, chargers, and FPV goggles. Absolutely love it, though. To be fair, it’s been a few thousand dollars over a decade. It ads up sure… but quite a bit less than I spend on video games, and more satisfying. :)

Hmmm. So I think I posted on Reddit maybe a half dozen times ever? I didn’t get the appeal. It kinda felt like shouting into a thunderstorm… I’m not sure I “get” Lemmy either, though it feels more like talking in a crowded room than everyone shouting at a cloud. :p More seriously though, I’ve had a few interesting conversations here, but miss the feel of forums of the 2000’s where people just talked about stuff that they were making. Lemmy feels like everyone is striking up a conversation, but still trying to be careful about talking about their own interests because that’s “self promotion”. :-\ I dunno, maybe I’m looking for something that just doesn’t exist anymore.