Originally Posted by wtf4096

I wanted to say, that it`s impossible to stop with game/engine programming altogether, even if you`re not doing it proffesionally anymore.

You can have periods of several months when you`re burnt out and won`t touch the code with the longest pole but you`ll always get back to it. It`s a living, breathing beast that asks to be tamed ;-)

There are always new effects to be checked, new ways of ding same thing, but more effeciently.

You can start playing with proceduraly generated terrains/buildings. And you can`t possibly finish polishing it during your lifetime :-)

Last year I wanted to do a "little upgrade" of my terrain renderer and have spent last year just playing with the terrain renderer.
In the meantime, Crysis is out, so I have to do a "little upgrade" again :-)

While the gamedev job itself is ugly and hard, the hobby is extremely rewarding, namely due to the fact, that the final product hasn`t been a work of hundreds humanoids/zombies, but just a work of you and your artist - meaning you can still create a nice 3D game just with two people - you as a coder and one dedicated artist. I`m intentionally omitting musician since there are thousands of free music files all over internet, along with sound effects.
And, if you went for some 3rd person game (e.g. RPG), you could do quite well even without an artist - if you spent $100 for fully animated charcaters, you could start playing with some characters right away.
For terrain, there are many art packages that can generate a terrain for you. And finding basic 3D props like barrels/crates is a question of half an hour worth of googling.

So, you can create a fully playable demo just as a coder with art assets from the internet. They might not match visually very well, but that`s easy to fix, once you have a demo - since at that time, many artists will want to join your project, seeing you`ve gone pretty far just by yourself.

And the message ? Forget the job, but enjoy the hobby ;-)