I'm a solo dev. I use an in-house game library instead of an engine. same idea, except the main loop is in your program, not the engine code - fewer callbacks.

SIMTrek - The first game i released - took 6 weeks. It was small, maybe 10,000-20,00 lines of pascal code. At that point i'd been programming PCs for about 8-9 years, and had written 2 unreleased PC games, a text mode D&D game, and an arcade flying saucer shooter game with vector graphics. I sold about 1000 copies of SIMTrek over the first 3 months at $20 a copy. Not bad for an impoverished college student. This was before there was an internet.

I'm now working on my 36th or so major release. its a FPSRPG/person sim hybrid, open world, etc , etc. about 150,000 lines of c++ code, and about 3-4 years working overtime ( ~60 hour weeks ). and i now have a total of 36 years experience in PC game development. and 27 years of doing it for profit.

I develop for windows PC only. Mac and Linux markets are too small to be worth the limited time i have as a solo dev. Consoles are not an open platform, although they are no longer the walled gardens they used to be. And the games i make are too big/complex for handheld devices. If it can't run the likes of Skyrim SE and Rome2 Total War, i don't even think about targeting it.

Truly a great story man thanks for the feedback. I'm hoping I can return these types of stories to other people some day. I have a passion for this and just hearing other peoples stories and hearing some people actually developed as a solo team makes me feel less alone in this process. I feel really comfortable with C# so learning the Unity Engine is my learning process right now.

You said you use your own in-house library instead of the game engine? That's super cool did you create that yourself?!