FWIW: So I started some hobbyist game dev using Unity and realised that the full process of making a game has dependencies on a mass of lower-level skills including lighting virtual environments. As a hobbyist photographer I could see some useful analogies from lighting studios and other scenes
So I pivoted, and eventually made money, not from selling a game, but from developing tutorials about digital lighting. I was also able to contribute to a project at work that was making a product based on a commercial games engine, not by actually coding it, but by helping to better estimate the costs of the asset generation required.
Coding Unity object scripts in C# also got me back into programming, and I went on to successfully build a self-hosting lisp interpreter following the Make a Lisp guidelines [0].
Thanks for being so interested! However the tutorial is actually specific to the Daz Studio system from Daz 3D, and the Iray render engine, and isn't free [0]. I'm in the process of doing a similar thing using more open source tools and released through a more accessible channel but realistically that will takes ages.
So I pivoted, and eventually made money, not from selling a game, but from developing tutorials about digital lighting. I was also able to contribute to a project at work that was making a product based on a commercial games engine, not by actually coding it, but by helping to better estimate the costs of the asset generation required.
Coding Unity object scripts in C# also got me back into programming, and I went on to successfully build a self-hosting lisp interpreter following the Make a Lisp guidelines [0].
[0] https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/master/process/guide.md