You'd be committing the classic fallacy of "i'll just work on these tools, then make the game", which while a fun exercise, almost never results in a game being released.
Think about what your ultimate goal is:
- you want to make games: use an existing engine. don't bother with half of the features, focus on whether the game is fun or not. add polish (like character animation transitions) later. use stock assets to begin with.
- you want knowledge to work in games industry but not actually release a game yourself: learn all the bells and whistles of Unreal Engine
- you want to make things that are unlike regular games: develop your own code
- you don't ever intend to release a game, you just want to see how they're made: just read other people's code. Read the Quake engine source code and https://fabiensanglard.net/ as a companion site.
If you're talking about using raylib, that is also a game engine, just a simpler one. We can look in both directions; if this is an exercise exclusively for personal learning and development, why not also learn about what's done for you by that library and by the GPU, etc? Occlusion, rasterisation, depth buffering, perspective-correct texture mapping...
"the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity" https://prog21.dadgum.com/177.html
this is what game engines do - they abstract the essential complexity present in all games, and keep it from infecting the one-time object, your game.
If you want to learn about games, honestly, take a look at existing engines. Take a look at old engines like DOOM or Quake, or even http://cubeengine.com/ and http://sauerbraten.org/ (and their corresponding source code) -- they are very simple compared to modern FPS engines. The Cube engines render geometry using octrees rather than the traditional BSP or recursive portal approach.
I am assuming latency and game reconcillation algorithms would be step 1
Yes, if you intend to make a networked game, write your netcode first, share state with client(s) over a network protocol, even if the network is 127.0.0.0/8
Netcode is its own area of study:
- https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensatin...
- https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_...
- https://github.com/0xFA11/MultiplayerNetworkingResources
Gamers have opinions about netcode, because it affects how they have to think in order to play the game, so netcode becomes as much a creative endeavour as the level design, graphics, etc.
Every area of endeavour you've mentioned is a fractal of timesuck. They all have their basics and then their advancements, that have been built up by thousands of people over decades.
If you are learning by doing, for god's sake, keep it simple. Make the simplest thing that works. If you're making an FPS, have static geometry and non-animated character models (a 2D sprite will do). Prioritise having the most basic thing working as your goal. Otherwise you will be off in the weeds for years and you'll probably give up having built nothing.
what day 0 to day 1000 of a game looks like
Pick a baseline (whether that's a game engine, or raw language) and then spend the rest of the time making the game: designing gameplay, levels, movement, interactivity, playtesting, feedback, placeholder art, real art... it's about standing on the shoulders of giants, not re-inventing the wheel, and putting your mind and creativity into the
new thing, which is your game