I once had a goal of working on a beat 'em up engine for fun. I wrote one version on Mac and then later thought to write it in javascript. Like many other projects I've done, I got it to a working state and moved on. :) Take a look here if you're curious: https://www.ussherpress.com/yokosukajs/
It's not "true" game development, i.e. using modern 3d engines, but it did cover the core issues to think about, and I was learning to write more fp-like code at the time, so it helped me learn functional programming a bit.
So, to echo other people's comments, there are transferable skills in game dev.
Except that changing direction quickly left/right feels kinda bad. Seems you wait for the animation to finish before checking for new key presses, not buffering the last pressed key.
For some background, I have a state machine for the animations and I've set up some to be interruptible starting on certain animations, and in this case, I the "turn around" animation has to play out completely before I allow new directions from the "director". (I call the characters on the screen "actors" and the source of directions "directors", which can be a human or AI.) Anyway, the fun was in coming up with the engine, of course. :)
And of course, what often gets forgotten: Make sure it is fun, somehow. In my opinion, nobody can "make" a good game. Can just pump out a lot of games, and hope one is good. Be it EA, or King Digital Entertainment.