Continuing the discussion from Picking/dropping up Items:
Thanks for helping out! It’s much appreciated.
I think everyone comes to indie game dev in a different way. Personally, I learned to code in school, via classes with lots of little, self-contained projects, and then worked in enterprise software for almost a decade before Tom and Tony founded Radiant, and I demanded to join them. From personal experience, I do think it requires a phenomenal amount of personal resolve and commitment to take on a large project–like a game–while balancing a full time job. If you fix bugs all day, you don’t really want to come home and fix bugs (albeit, different bugs) all night!
If you’re going to try to do something in your free time, I would advise starting with a small project, the very smallest thing you can think of that you’d still like to see in the world. Then learn whatever it is you need to do to get that project to live. Depending on the project, it might not even require code; lots of frameworks and communities (including this one!) exist out there to help jump start aspiring game developers.