The first question I think you should ask yourself is: why do you want to go into game development? Is it to take part in making a AAA hit? Do you have lots of your own game designs that you'd love to see the light to day? Do you want to work on a 500-person team on a AAA title, or with two other people on your thing? What sort of games do you want to make? Depending on the answer to those questions, the path you'll want to take will be very different.
My personal dream was more on the "I want to make my own things and control everything" side, so after leaving traditional tech, I focused on releasing lots of freeware games, an active Twitter presence, and building up "brand" recognition for myself in preparation for the first commercial title.
I'm now a somewhat successful solo indie dev, and my latest game Slipways [1] pays my bills as I'm getting ready for my second big project. So this approach can work, but it is very... effort heavy. And probably nowhere close to what you want to do if your goals are different from mine.
But: if you really want it and have the programming chops already (and it looks like you do), getting into gamedev is mostly a matter of taking the plunge and seeing where that path takes you.
As a quick aside: I love Slipways. Amazing job, very interesting little game :)
On topic, I'm working in the same vein as you currently (without the indie hit) - I like building worlds that I want to see the light of day. I've found itch.io to be an amazing community and resource as a part-time games developer. It makes it stupid easy to get a game to the web and similarly easy to use sophisticated tools like Unity to make games for other platforms.
Itch.io is great and has single-handedly made it much easier to get an early audience for a freeware game. It's been a great help for me as well. It's harder to actually earn money there (at least in my case, it's orders of magnitude less money than eg. Steam), but you can't beat it for ease of publishing something and seeing what people think of it.
Ooh, I own Slipways :). I don't know if I really sat down to play it (I have a bad habit of buying games and they sit for months before I get around to playing them) so I should do so.
I'm working on a game I'm hoping to release on Steam Early Access in roughly six months. It'll be my first proper game release in over ten years (life happened and a five year detour into board game design), so I really don't know how to market these things very well anymore, and it's an abstract strategy game (specifically a sequel to a game I released on Xbox 360 a decade ago[1]).
And my video game industry network is practically nonexistent now, except for a handful of people I used to work with back when I was doing it professionally.
Do you have any recommendations for building up a brand? I was going to start live coding on Twitch, especially since there's going to be some Twitch features in the game I need to test anyway, but beyond that I don't really know what's effective anymore.
That's a big topic, and one I'm not an expert on - if I was forced to pick my weakest gamedev suit, marketing would be it.
What worked for me was picking a social media outlet I felt comfortable with, then using it to its fullest. For me, that was Twitter, back in the 140-character days way before all this Musk mess. Twitch might work for you, if you enjoy building up an audience around a stream - though with a coding stream you're mostly going to get other programmers (not necessarily a bad thing depending on the game).
The biggest boost in recognition for Slipways was as a result of Twitch/YouTube content creators featuring it. Content creators (not necessarily limited to YT/Twitch) is where I would focus my efforts these days when trying to get the word out. The smaller-to-medium-sized ones are usually very approachable and eager to try stuff out.
Any advice on how to improve on art/graphics for a developer? I always find that I can program just fine, but when it comes to creating models and splash art, I have no idea what I'm doing.
First of all when you are unemployed you get free healthcare, "urząd pracy" have some ways to help you, for example getting job experience like paid internships, some education about jobs/getting them, unemployment benefits. "MOPS" also have ways to help. You got paid when you are on long sick leave. Parental leave that is long enough to be useful. You can get sick leave on your child. It's not perfect but
Slipways is built on top of Unity. If your main goal is to make a game (a daunting prospect on its own), having to create an engine on top of that is probably not going to help your chances.
If your main goal is to enjoy yourself, there are very few programming tasks as varied and fulfilling as writing your own game engine. Personally, I'm glad there are alternatives.
You are not! PICO-8 was where I started, and it was a great experience - both for its community at the time and due to the constraints it imposed, making me focus on finishing games and boiling them down to the essentials.
I heartily recommend PICO-8 for anybody trying to get into hobby/solo gamedev from the programming direction.
Almost all indie devs these days use Unity or Unreal. You'll get more output out of these quicker, and that will encourage you to continue developing.
Don't be put off from writing your own engine, but it is quite a daunting task, expecially for 3D.
Besides rendering, these off the shelf engines provide tooling that make game development easier on you. Map editing, animation editing, sound editing etc all built in.
I looked hard at Unity but ultimately couldn’t get myself past the learning curve and went with MonoGame instead, this allowed me to prototype my game idea in a mere 8-12 hours of coding without any clunky interface getting in the way.
I am not sure if I made the right choice or not but the engine I’m working on is indeed very satisfying to build though I am aware I could have had a playable game by now instead of still be implementing hand cranked shader animations and trying to architect a custom rendering stack… but I figure if it’s not one thing it’s another!
Plus if you do succeed don’t you end up owing Unity a bunch of money?
You made the right choice if you're still working at it. Staying on target is more important than the bad choices you might make - otherwise you'll end up like me and thousands others who are indecisive and consequently produce nothing.
My personal dream was more on the "I want to make my own things and control everything" side, so after leaving traditional tech, I focused on releasing lots of freeware games, an active Twitter presence, and building up "brand" recognition for myself in preparation for the first commercial title.
I'm now a somewhat successful solo indie dev, and my latest game Slipways [1] pays my bills as I'm getting ready for my second big project. So this approach can work, but it is very... effort heavy. And probably nowhere close to what you want to do if your goals are different from mine.
But: if you really want it and have the programming chops already (and it looks like you do), getting into gamedev is mostly a matter of taking the plunge and seeing where that path takes you.
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1264280/Slipways/