Writing this in the middle of everything: three jobs, engines built at night, papers read on weekends. And precisely because of that, something for the people out there who know exactly who they are.
You have a job. Maybe a family. Life is full. But you're a gamer, you always have been, and somewhere in you there's a game you've dreamed of making for years, the one you and your friends keep saying "someone should make this" about. Now is the time. Not in a motivational-poster way. Structurally, historically, now is the time.
The uncomfortable word: AI. It's unpopular in a lot of rooms, but everyone uses it, we use it, and the technology is handing over the keys to tell our own stories in a new medium. Being precise about it matters, though. Don't use AI for art, for the things people can do better, and people can do so much better. If you code, find your artist friends. If you're an artist, find your coder friends. That's what friendships were for. Do use it to mock up an idea, to see it moving on a screen, to test something small. Vibe coding is genuinely good for that. Get the idea out of your head and onto the screen, then take it from there. A couple of hours a week with the friends you've been dreaming out loud with. That's how ours started.
Film history has a pattern that gives us goosebumps. The first decades of cinema were driven entirely by huge studios and massive productions, because making a film was unbelievably costly and there was no other way in. Then costs came down, tools spread out, and for the next fifty years the most wonderful films came from small independents making films simply because they loved it. Jarmusch shooting on leftover film stock. Cassavetes making his films with friends, on his own terms. Carpenter, just him and his people. Scorsese's first film, basically on his own. The studios never disappeared. But the soul of the art form moved to the small rooms.
Gaming is at exactly that moment. The indie era isn't coming, it's already here, and it's about to boom over the next twenty years in a way that will make right now look like the beginning it is. The cost wall that kept everyone out is coming down, the same way it did for film.
So the only question left is the one Jarmusch and Cassavetes answered with borrowed cameras: do you love it enough to start? Go make it. Two hours a week, your oldest friends, a rough mockup, and love. That's how every golden age begins.