Speaking from my limited experience here. I'm a professional front-end developer with a gamedev hobby. Making games is what sparked my interest in programming in the first place, actually.
Before considering jumping ship, try working on a game project. Oddly enough, creating games isn't, well, fun and games. Where the front-end project lifecycle is fairly similar from project to project, regardless of the technologies used, the whole game development workflow is highly dependent on the actual engine and target platform. Of course, with a competent team you can make anything work, but the whole process is still quite different. Then again, front-end and gamedev projects have different inputs and different expected outputs, so the process is bound to differ.
I have no first-hand experience in the gamedev industry itself, so I won't comment on that.
Like @antogarand
said, game jams are a great way to pursue gamedev as a hobby. I have taken part in five game jams (mostly Ludum Dares and one Global Game Jam) and all of them have been an amazing experience. Given your background, you can do your first jam with your favourite front-end stack so you get a taste without leaving your comfort zone. Who knows, maybe a jam game turns out great and will turn into a real project after the event?
When looking for actual game engines to learn and use, @taillogs
and I recommend giving Godot a look. It's a completely open-source game engine with a suprising amount of features and is quite comparable to Unity. I absolutely love working with Godot and prefer it to any other engine (I have tried Unity, UE4, Phaser.js and pygame).
The syntax is very similar to Python, but the language itself is specifically designed for Godot. It also has an optional type system, nice syntactic sugar to access and interact with game objects and if you use the built-in code editor, you also get context-aware autocompletion and documentation, real-time static analysis and debug tools. A really nice developer experience in my opinion.
More python-like than js. I switched to it from C# on my current game project and likely will never go back. It's a pleasure to use once you get the hang of it (though my project is simple and performance isn't a concern really, so YMMV)
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Speaking from my limited experience here. I'm a professional front-end developer with a gamedev hobby. Making games is what sparked my interest in programming in the first place, actually.
Before considering jumping ship, try working on a game project. Oddly enough, creating games isn't, well, fun and games. Where the front-end project lifecycle is fairly similar from project to project, regardless of the technologies used, the whole game development workflow is highly dependent on the actual engine and target platform. Of course, with a competent team you can make anything work, but the whole process is still quite different. Then again, front-end and gamedev projects have different inputs and different expected outputs, so the process is bound to differ.
I have no first-hand experience in the gamedev industry itself, so I won't comment on that.
Like @antogarand said, game jams are a great way to pursue gamedev as a hobby. I have taken part in five game jams (mostly Ludum Dares and one Global Game Jam) and all of them have been an amazing experience. Given your background, you can do your first jam with your favourite front-end stack so you get a taste without leaving your comfort zone. Who knows, maybe a jam game turns out great and will turn into a real project after the event?
When looking for actual game engines to learn and use, @taillogs and I recommend giving Godot a look. It's a completely open-source game engine with a suprising amount of features and is quite comparable to Unity. I absolutely love working with Godot and prefer it to any other engine (I have tried Unity, UE4, Phaser.js and pygame).
So you can code in "GDScript, C#, C++"? Is GDScript like a JS type syntax?
The syntax is very similar to Python, but the language itself is specifically designed for Godot. It also has an optional type system, nice syntactic sugar to access and interact with game objects and if you use the built-in code editor, you also get context-aware autocompletion and documentation, real-time static analysis and debug tools. A really nice developer experience in my opinion.
More python-like than js. I switched to it from C# on my current game project and likely will never go back. It's a pleasure to use once you get the hang of it (though my project is simple and performance isn't a concern really, so YMMV)