Making Assets

It's very difficult to learn about different game engine technologies if you don't both have some skill at making art, and also some skill at programming.  I've used a variety of tools.  In high school I had a short period in which I tried out Flash, Sketchup, and 3D Studio Max, an I honed my skill in Adobe Photoshop.  In the end I mainly use Photoshop, Cheetah3D, Blender, and Audacity to manipulate images for textures, 3D models and audio respectively.  Of course for programming really any text editor will do and the remainder of the prefab setup is done within the game engine.  I can do polygonal modeling, and texturing of rigid shapes but there is more of an art to organic shapes and a tremendous patience needed to do animation.  Conveniently for humanoid characters, the problem of animation is completely solved, though creating and rigging humanoids is still difficult if you want them to be more than a simple template.

Some art forms remain a mystery to me, especially digital painting, digital sculpting and musical composition.  It bewilders me to watch those kinds of artists work.  They work at such speed, and have difficulty explaining their exact process.  It's simply more practical to hire them, than to put in the same 10000 hours to become as good as they are at their individual jobs.

The mobile revolution did not come without its problems though.  The first of which was that the shear number of games that were of mediocre quality released for the platform drove consumers to distrust mobile games.  This was compounded by the predatory practices of developers with microtransactions, and the 

There is also a problem of porting a game from one system from another  there was now an expectation that franchises should have a mobile port, though this involves extra work and depending on game type might not even be possible due to constraints on the input system of the phone.  Without a controller the only input on a phone is usually the touchscreen or accelerometer, so games that need precise mouse clicks or many gamepad buttons are unsuitable.

The GUI must also be laid out differently and adapt to orientation and resolution.  When the iPhone introduced retina displays which doubled the pixel density of the phone, suddenly all code that relied on a fixed resolution, caused GUIs to shrink to only the top left quarter of the screen, and some straight ports of games are completely unusable because text that was legible on a large monitor cannot be read.