Game jams, when I was younger and had the energy to do a long weekend of coding after a week of work.
Ludum Dare was particularly good fun in its early years (early-mid 2000s), when it was a fairly small community, when people were coding from-scratch, before Unity became an option and the event grew into something a lot bigger.
Game jam coding is different to 'real' game dev, as the time pressure encurages you to just hack away freely and creatively, not spend too much time thinking about building reusable systems or tools, and you can discard the codebase at the end of the weekend.
These days, small functional 3D printing projects can be quite satisfying. Going from a sketch to a simple CAD model to a first draft print, iterating the design a couple of times, and ending up with a simple-but-useful physical object, learning a bit more Fusion 360 in the process.
I had a good run doing LD in the 2010s. Half of all entries were unity last time I was in. The others were mostly unreal or something else. I don't think godot was big yet
I remember the big SPA rework of the website that seemed like overkill. Then a couple people bitched me out for preparing base code, so I stopped. How dare I try to get myself halfway to where the unity devs started, I guess.
Ludum Dare was particularly good fun in its early years (early-mid 2000s), when it was a fairly small community, when people were coding from-scratch, before Unity became an option and the event grew into something a lot bigger.
Game jam coding is different to 'real' game dev, as the time pressure encurages you to just hack away freely and creatively, not spend too much time thinking about building reusable systems or tools, and you can discard the codebase at the end of the weekend.
These days, small functional 3D printing projects can be quite satisfying. Going from a sketch to a simple CAD model to a first draft print, iterating the design a couple of times, and ending up with a simple-but-useful physical object, learning a bit more Fusion 360 in the process.