[abhink]

What would you suggest as a starting point for a regular software engineer who'd like to look into this? See how everything comes together at a high level I mean? Because to someone on the outside, the field of game development appears to be very daunting.

[phreack]

There are a lot of libraries in different languages that are sort of in a middle place between drag n drop engines and programming straight to a graphics API like Direct3d or Vulkan. You should look around for a popular one in a language that you're already comfortable with and read up on tutorials, documentation, and such first.

For reference, the ones I used to love and seem to still be kicking were Phaser.js for web games and Libgdx (on Kotlin) for mobile/desktop. Both were incredibly fun to learn, and I went at it very slowly on my own pace with a clear, small-scoped, end game goal each time. It was very hard but worthwhile to not let myself fall to scope creep, and after a couple of completed prototypes I felt ready to tackle 3d. I got some projects on C# that used Direct3d to draw things with triangles and went nuts trying to implement the concepts I read about in books like realtimerendering.com

I know it all looks daunting at first, but always remember that it's supposed to be a very long, very fun journey, meant to satisfy your intellectual curiosity at every step of the way. Games and graphics are one of the most rewarding problem spaces since every time that you learn a new concept and get it working, you get to see it and play with it and it's the best feeling ever!

And while I'm here I want to share the most wonderful tutorial on how to build hexagonal grids for games and things, in case you want to do something hexagonal at some point like I did, from what I think is one of the best educational resources I've ever seen: https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

Cheers!

[gentleman11]

That site has a rather good walkthrough of pathfinding in general

[pietrovismara]

Starting with something easy, like 2d animations in browser using libraries like pixi.js. From there you can expand on many topics, just focus on one at once, be it shaders, networking (for multiplayer games) or whatever might interest you.

[WillPostForFood]

Monogame if you are coming from C# background, or want a fun intro to C#.

https://www.monogame.net/