[Feneric]

Definitely. I slake my thirst for game dev by creating games in between job contracts as well as on some weekends. I've written a few interactive fiction pieces, but my most downloaded titles are in the category of retro RPGs in the style of the old 8-bit Ultima games (as found on the C64/128, but playable on modern hardware). It's admittedly a niche. They are Minima https://feneric.itch.io/minima and Anteform https://feneric.itch.io/anteform and are both open source.

[flashgordon]

Holy crap these are amazing. Good on you mate. I wonder if there is some kind of game dev guild for folks who want to just get together for a weekend hackathon and build games/engines!

[Feneric]

Thanks! I don't know of anything exactly like that, but there are plenty of hackathons and the like that are similar. It's not to hard to sit down with the docs and/or tutorials for systems like Godot, Inform 7, Ren'Py, etc. and put something basic together. Expect to throw away your initial one or two projects, but after that you should be good to go. I built Minima & Anteform using PICO-8, a virtual console. The RPG game system they use I had to build from scratch first. For me it was mostly a challenge to see if I could fit that much gameplay and story into the available footprint, but if you're starting out with one of the systems I mentioned it should be a lot easier. Also, don't get discouraged if you seem to be "almost done" for a long time. It often takes as long (or longer) for the last 10% and polish than it does for the initial 90%.