I’d suggest searching for this question on reddit’s /r/gamedev to hear a lot of perspectives.

Mine? Don’t. By that I mean, and assuming you haven’t already, spend a few years making small games from start to finish. Pick games to copy, don’t even hold yourself to having a unique spin on things. The goal being to 1) practice for the real thing and 2) decide if you actually want to make games or just fantasize about doing so. The latter isn’t a judgement, I’ve almost left games twice because of the emotional burnout.

For a point of reference, I spent two years getting up at 6am twice a week with a friend to gamejam and practice. All in prep to go indie. This was even after 6 years making games and leading two.

The result? We almost failed completely. If I hadn’t decided to say fuck it and stick the game on PS4 for fun, we would have grossed a grand total of $100k for a year of work. The more depressing fact? $100k is considered a significant success for an indie game on Steam.

Happy to provide more anecdotal experience around this if you like.

Just to add to the chorus of similar comments: I fantasized about becoming a game developer in school. I had no allusions, I knew what that took. I studied linear algebra, wrote toy games on my own, and even took up physics at university so that I could learn things like optics and motion simulation.

I got a job as a game developer, and I wrote a game engine. I was so burnt out and unhappy that I had to go on anti-depressants.

Years later, some of the most fun I had was optimising financial reporting databases. Why? I dunno, it was just more fun somehow. It wasn't my dream, and I felt like I was that kid that wanted to become an astronaut and ended up in middle management at some megacorp. But you know what? Optimising queries uses the same skills as optimising a game engine! It's fun, and you get paid for it. You get immediate feedback from users, instead of complaining from entitled brats on forums two years later...

Take my cynical pov with a pinch of salt... I left (indie?) gamedev to get a normal job, and have been much better off both mentally and financially.

In addition to what hesdeadjim said, I'd also like to add don't blindly accept the common gamedev maxims. For example, "Make the game YOU want to play" is repeated as good advice, but I haven't found it to be very useful.

First off, if I'm working as the sole developer and have total control over design decisions, it's easier to follow that advice than if I'm working with multiple people who all play different genres of games. A lot of the time people will only use gamedev-jargon to back up their design decisions (immersion, positive feedback, vertical slices, etc), which are hard to argue about because they're so subjective and ill-defined.

Also, keep in mind how many times Level 1 gets tested. At a certain point, no matter how excited I am about the game, I'm going to get sick of playing it. From that point on, I'm no longer developing a game I want to play. I'm developing a game I should want to play but don't (I think this adds a lot to burnout). Maybe start the project as a game you want to play, but make peace with the fact that it's ultimately not for you to enjoy playing. It's for the players. You're very likely going to be sick of the game by the time it ships.

"Make it juicy" and "avoid premature optimizations" are more maxims with limited use, and are even contradictory in a lot of instances. For juice/polish: Focus on the core gameplay mechanics. Once those are set in stone, make them juicy if you want/have the time. A juicy boring game is still a boring game. For performance/optimization: If a core part of your game is having 10,000 enemies on the screen at once, you're going to have to make design decisions based on performance at the very beginning of development. Kinda related: I've shipped a game where at the beginning of development, I suggested using Multiple Render Targets (we were doing deferred rendering with the XNA Framework) to speed up the rendering (instead of rendering everything, switching render targets, rendering everything again, switching render targets, repeat...) but the lead dev took the "avoid premature optimizations" maxim to heart, and we ended up with a significantly hobbled final product on PS4s and lower-end PCs. I guess I could have gone into "crunch mode" and rewrote the entire rendering pipeline to make up for poor decisions at the start of the project, but I wasn't willing to do that.

It was my dream to make games from the age of probably 13 to ~28. I'm 35 now, and am not all that interested in games any more. I enjoy doing "gamedev" as a hobby, because I've realized my preferred method of "playing" is to program little toys I can tinker with for a few hours and then abandon. I also have MDD, so YMMV. Best of luck, though.