Please comment down below. For loyalsheep, it's their mainstream work.
I feel that I fit somewhere in the middle. Currently speaking yes, gamedev is my hobby - I'm not making games with the intention of making money and I'm doing it in my spare time. On the other hand, once I have some more substance in my game, I'll probably implement ads on the mobile platforms. Extra cash is always welcome :p
I tried to make it into more than just a hobby. It earned me little money and much trouble. So these days I'm busy reconsidering my goals, and how to reach them. Either way, the games have to be front and center, because without them there can't be a gaming hobby... or a gaming business. So to put the money first would be a mistake no matter what.
I work in a hospital and do my writing/ designing when I can. The coder also works full time, so it's just a question of determination and how much time can be spared. If we got lucky and started making some money, I might try to switch to part time hours, but I'd struggle with such as isolated job as development.
I have a part-time job but my husband and I are trying to make game development our mainstream work. We found it complements our skills well. However, we only recently found a comfortable role for each other that not only works but we both enjoy. We also learned from releasing our first game ,Sarah in the Sky, that setting achievable short term goals is vital to us. Yes, we are just starting out but we are optimistic.
For me, I wanted to try making games for a living with various teams. Over time, lives changed and some people went their separate ways. My life changed too and time for game dev has gone from full time to casual. So basically it is a hobby, but also to earn money so that maybe I can go back into full time again, hire more teams, etc.
Currently, and possibly for a short time, my day job.
My first complete game (Antistar: Rising) found a little success on mobile (9 years ago, almost); thought I could make it, didn't turn out so good. Spent quite a few years licking my wounds; freelance gigs then a long string of... game unrelated coding gigs. Money was good, taught me lots, but passion is a thing and having the tiniest slivers of time to work on what I love isn't ideal so I decided to give it another try.
Some lessons I learned:
I'm currently remaking my very first game (in preparation of a sequel, and with a much wider range of target platforms) which may sound a little boring but, I get attached to my projects... doing stuff over again makes it a lot easier to learn and improve : )
So true and yet so hard to follow. We seem to fall into that "rabbit hole syndrome" all the time. Before we even realize to cut it short a week or two passes by and the project stalls. That's why we started to set up schedules with milestones that are fairly short term. If we have a date set for a feature we seem to be able to keep our focus better. For example, instead of diving into the full rpg game, which we wanted to develop next, we decided to make a mini prequel to test out our ideas as well as the functionalities.
I work full-time as a c# programmer and jr. level designer at a small game studio (~20 people) that often does outsource work for larger AA/AAA studios. However, I have worked with a few groups in the past (none of which have produced anything public) and have spent a lot of time myself on personal projects (again, none of which I felt were good enough to release).
Currently in the middle of developing my first commercial multi-player game under the banner of my own studio... so I guess I'm both a professional and hobbyist developer.
If you know the syntax generally for programming languages you can pretty much write in any language with the difference of the syntax terminology and some functions, such as auto-dumping, multi-inheritance support, etc.
It's gotten better with the amount of resources available than it was back in the 90's (Windows 2.1/95 era).
For Python it would basically be something like this. From what I recall by default Python treats variables as Objects and not as Primitive Data as some languages have.
print("I am a python tidbit")
I'm more of a Software Engineer that deals mainly with backend/front-end/NoS programming. While writing games isn't a career, it can be a fun and useful skillful hobby to do. One also feels that there are things missing from the current scene of the main-stream gaming industry be it either glazed over, repetitive, or excluded.