General Discussion

I have a few friends who used to go to game jams, which are competitions where you or a group compete to make a video game in a set time frame. A lot of the people who went to them were programmers, but there were also artists, writers, musicians, etc. that participated as part of groups. If you have any interest or talent in things like that, there's other avenues to get involved in making games besides being a code monkey.

As far as actually learning to code, if you want to continue pursuing that, you may be jumping in too deep, you gonna learn to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. Unless you're a real prodigy, you're probably not going to be able to make much of anything beyond a basic text-based game for months or years from starting to learn programming. Start small, basically every game dev or software developer out there started with a "hello world" program at some point that literally just prints those words on your screen and literally nothing else. There's a lot of options out there to learn from, but you need to start from somewhere and follow the whole track before you understand enough to make a game from scratch.

You may not have to start totally from scratch depending on what you want to get out of the experience, there are some games and tools that require little or no coding knowledge to do some pretty cool stuff with that you can play around with.

As far as non-video game stuff, I took up painting minis for my d&d games over COVID. I wouldn't consider myself to be an artsy person, but I'm doing alright. I started with the reaper minis learn to point kits. Even if you don't play tabletop games, it's a pretty fun hobby on its own. From there I started getting into gaslands, where you modify and paint hot wheels cars to use in the game. There's of course also traditional model kits you can do, and related hobbies like model railroading.

You can also get into cooking, I dabble in a lot of hobbies but if your goal is to show off, nothing gets a bigger reaction than something tasty.

Depending on how much workspace you have available and your tools and materials budget, you can also get into various types of woodworking, leatherwork, sewing, basket weaving, electronics, painting/drawing, writing, jewelry making, metalworking, fly tying (even if you don't fish yourself, they're pretty neat to look at,) making terrarium, the list goes on. Basically you just need to pick something you think is neat that you'd want to make and figure out how to do it.