One of the reasons I got into software development was that I wanted to make some games (even just small ones that I release for free).
I've now been coding for like 14 years, and I still haven't done it (besides a number of prototypes). And I'm so burnt out on writing code that I never have the mental energy to push through and get one done.
I have a suggestion for you. Try making a board game instead. No complex technology to learn, way different than already being burnt out from coding all day, you can iterate on the fly by writing on your prototype, some can be tested solo (but having some friends come over once a week isn't insurmountable and is very social), lots on online testing available using "no rules" engines that let you just move "objects" around (a little tech to learn but done in a few hours), etc.
If if your game never gets published, etc. you could have a game that you and your friends got countless hours of enjoyment from. I personally get a lot of enjoyment from it. Good luck!
Heh, I started working on a board game with a couple friends and then got caught up reading card descriptions from a shared Google Spreadsheet and generating images to work with Tabletop Simulator.
It's a different kind of work from my usual though, and it was fun to see my friends in awe that they could write arbitrarily many new cards and almost instantaneously see them in the game.
> I've now been coding for like 14 years, and I still haven't done it (besides a number of prototypes). And I'm so burnt out on writing code that I never have the mental energy to push through and get one done.
I was basically the same. Played video games before programming was even on my mind, and first exposure to programming/structured data was trying to mod GTA Vice City vehicles, and then eventually got drawn into programming while trying to game dev by night basically.
On and off I've tried Gamemaker, Unity, Phaser, Godot, Unreal Engine and everything in-between, for the last two decades or something. It always end up the same, game logic so complicated I can't make head or tails of it anymore, and it was really hard to decouple things enough so I could be as confident editing game logic as I am reading/editing other types of codebases.
So I never really got anywhere, until I found Bevy. I'm not particularly fond of Rust, way too verbose and strict for my taste, but ECS turned out to be a god-send for organizing game code (in my case). Suddenly writing decoupled game logic became a breeze, and since discovering Bevy (but really ECS gets most of the credit here), I've even shipped some games during game jams that I'm moderately proud off and placed well in the ranking compared to my expectations.
If you're of similar traits that you need code to be of a certain quality to be able to effectively work with it, ECS might be up your alley too, and worth a try if you haven't already. It made a huge improvement in terms of how flexible the architecture end up being, and made it a lot easier to incrementally work on games.