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.