I just completed a rebuild of Cat-ching Sun, the demo, using Godot. It was really rewarding to slow down and use AI to teach me more of the why behind Godot. I used Claude to give me milestones, stipulating that it not give me the answers. We talked through design approaches and found best practices while building a small strategy game. With that milestone by milestone approach and GDQuest courses, I have a good understanding of signals, trees, and tilemaps.
Overall, my impression is that game engines are lifesavers. For example, not having to implement a observer pattern, and having that replaced with signals makes it so much easier to focus on the game. I did have some curiosities about how best to implement things like the command pattern and how composite patterns apply when the UI is so easily built with button nodes. More to explore as I build other games.
I'd like to try to build a strategy grid-based isometric game, since it gives you more of a 3d feel without overburdening the developer. I have so many questions for indie developers. Do they just use already built assets? I can't imagine trying to build your own assets, plus code everything in GDscripts.