Making games in rust in retirement is my plan. Not, you know, good games (zero game dev experience), or games that anyone would realistically want to play, but seems like it would be interesting to learn.

Yeah exactly :) I had no experience and, if I'm being honest, I was shit at game dev, but boy is it a nice means of creative self-expression. (https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants/ / https://ant.care/)

It's really fulfilling to be able to show people your work and have them play with it. It's so different than like.. spec'ing out a new database schema and then building some APIs over it. They're both coding, but one's a little harder to have a convo about at the dinner table.

Rust is such a mature language to use coming from a JavaScript background. I don't think it makes the best language for writing good games because it's too challenging to write bad prototypes you intend to throw away. You have to refactor frequently and code-compile-run loop is so slow. The lack of quick prototyping discourages me from playing around with ideas that might not work out and that makes for a worse game. However, as a programmer, Rust is an incredibly satisfying language to write in. Everything you do always feels very technically correct. The Rust quip that "if it compiles then it probably works" is very accurate and is a continuous source of pleasure.

As someone coming on 30 months of retirement, I'm consciously shifting away from toy projects to projects where I commit to a more polished deliverable.

It helps with commitment and pursuing a deeper learning of the activity instead of doing quick and dirty stuff in my experience. Just don't expect it (or aim for it) to be a steam top-seller, my aim is usually to have at least one other stranger get some amount of value out of what I produce.

Not to say there isn't a place for quick and dirty projects, of course. Bespoke 3D models to fix things around the house are my current favourite category for that.

I'll see how I really feel when it happens but when I retire I don't want to look at a computer for a very long time. I suppose after some time I might get drawn back but I plan to de-tech my life as much as I can.

I’d like to invest time into the Linux gaming ecosystem. Though it’s a little daunting that so much of the work would need to be done by Nvidia and major game studios that don’t really care.

Windows just feels irredeemably mediocre at this point. Maybe Windows 12 will improve things, but I’ve been pretty down on 11.