...it's very hard. I started with 2D and the most easiest part is drawing on the screen and making something move. However, as soon as you try to add basic physics(they don't have to be realistic) or other stuff like collision detection or collision resolution, it becomes difficult, you begin to see errors in your design that you chose in the beginning, but it's too late to fix it, so you try to get around it with some fix, but turns out the fix has a bug that isn't really a bug but it can crash your program, you can mostly handle it, but you really don't know if there are any edge-cases which aren't handled or if your fix even works as intended.

And it's also important to carefully consider if your map will be uniform or not as it directly affects performance and difficulty of your code and various other aspects that I didn't.

So yeah, game programming is hard, takes one to do it to know it even if someone else told you it's hard. Makes me wonder if I will ever be able to work with 3D game programming if I am already at my limits so far.

A few weeks is not going to do anything for you. Be prepared for spending years. Take it slow and be very patient.

That depends on my ability to finish this and whether I give up or not.

a 2D platformer, technically it's my second game, but for clarity think of it as my first, as the previous one I gave up on.

People work too hard on their projects. I would just write a console application and start from there. Too many hours learning an API just to display something. I would try a more higher level technology. Too many games that need near real-time responses.

It is not hard, there is just an enormous learning curve depending on which route you take, also a few weeks isn't a long time. I think there needs to be more ermm positive stories on here, you know like people saying "man I love graphics programming so much, that I quit my job so that I can spend more time programming" or something, I am sure there are A LOT of regular people on this forum who once found game programming hard now get hard for it.

Oh and it gets 'easier' and if you keep it up, the enjoyment you get out of it will grow