Neat, I hadn't realized MattGrandis was from the industry. Myself, I've been working at Deep Silver Volition, a modestly-sized studio in Champaign, IL, since 2006. So, close to 15 years in the industry. I have coworkers who have experienced every corner of the industry, from tiny indies who came looking for job security, to publishers like Activision and Ubisoft who have more artists working on flotsam like cola cans and dining props than Volition directly employs across the entire studio.
About the industry in general Everything Matt said about the industry is absolutely true.
I think the AAA side really hits its low point around the time of the infamous "ea_spouse" letter, which accused AAA mega-giant Electronic Arts of abusing their workforce with 70 hour work-weeks, as their modus operandi
before talking about "crunch". EA was rumored to have 50% year-over-year turnover in their employees around that time, as in 50% of their workforce was leaving and needed to be replaced, each year.
Crunch is still an infamous issue in the industry, whether we're talking about CD Projekt Red crunching to release Cyberpunk 2077, Ubisoft crunching to release Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands, or Activision crunching to release the next Call of Duty, it's a practice that is endemic to the industry. To some extent, my understanding is that it's endemic to software development, but it's especially acute in gamedev. It's a complex problem to solve, and unionization would probably force the issue, but unions have their own problems and many gamedevs are understandably worried that if they attempted to unionize then they'd just get fired and replaced by younger, more naive kids.
Job security is also still an issue today. Even the largest publishers are only 1 or 2 big flops away from ruin at any given time, and many studios don't functionally survive their first flop (they lose key employees, or are reorganized, or hemorrhage people until they can't operate, or simply shutter their doors forever), even if they have long histories of success. Also, it's still common for folks, artists especially, to finish a project and be immediately laid off because their studio won't have work for them to do for several months. Thankfully, Volition doesn't work like this, and never has, but my understanding is that we're an outlier. And yeah, in spite of some 27 years of being in business, we got hurt badly by the failure of Agents of Mayhem, our most recent release, which was just completely
dead on arrival.
This industry, I tell you. Saying "it's not for everyone" is a level of understatement I'd almost exclusively reserve for British characters from historical fiction. If V shutters, I'll probably exit the industry entirely, myself, go back to gamedev being a hobby that can exhaust my creative urges, and eventually reclaim the ~30% pay difference I'm told I could be making by plying my trade anywhere else in town.
Oh, and that reminds me: Since nobody else has mentioned it, be aware that AAA gamedev absolutely comes with a
fun tax, in that I mean you can expect to be paid less for what you're doing than if you were doing it for anyone else. Because getting in is grand, but there's no shortage of kids willing to absolutely kill themselves to get in behind you, and that drives down wages. (My story of breaking in out of college involved driving 5 hours to an in-person interview from out-of-state and booking my own room in a local motel. It really didn't bother me, in part because I didn't have any idea what to expect from the interview process; but since V tries to be better than most, our recruiter at the time was rather embarrassed by it. It helped drive my resume to the top of the pile, though.)
Game-development options I also agree with Matt that, of those options,
Godot is the closest to approach direct relevance for a game programming career, though you really want to look into
Unreal if you're looking at a programming path. Failing that, at least C++. It's not that our industry has no need of low-level CPU and hardware guys, it's just that we're talking about a team of maybe 3 dedicated guys amongst a programming staff of 46, and it wouldn't even be that many except that we roll our own bespoke game engine for our franchises, instead of using a third-party engine. And besides, almost every platform is X86 these days... and have you seen that instruction set? Even in the heydays of Michael Abrash writing articles about VGA programming, optimizing that stuff was an art in trial and error, and these days really is best left to compilers.
I would also echo Bruce's advice that you should probably think of your first game as a learning experience, and to decide whether you like gamedev enough to want to get in for the long haul. (Of course, if it turns out well, I don't think there's anything wrong with using it as a portfolio piece.)
Whatever path you go, just remember these things:
Keep it small.
Keep it focused.
Have fun! (Otherwise, what's the point?)