As someone who’s daily logistics have not changed that much (been working from home for 18 months, and not really going out besides grocery shopping), I feel like you have something here.

I’ve definitely been more tired in the past 2 months, and checking in with myself I have noticed that I’ve been pushing away anxiety

I've been working on similar productive things (i.e. reading, jogging, projects), to keep out the 'what-ifs'. One of those projects I intend to start soon is building a small game. I've come across a lot of discussion about engines, frameworks, and hand-built options. A large majority push for larger engines like Unity or Godot that 'do it all' to focus more on the game and less on what's needed to build it. That seems alright, but being a backend dev, I generally enjoy understanding the full operation and building it out as close to my needs as possible.

What have you used for your smaller games? And what would you recommend for someone with programming experience, but lacking experience in pretty much every other facet of game development?

I am a big fan of the Lua LOVE framework. It's all Lua and very minimal boilerplate code.

Recently there was a post about a game called BYTEPATH and the developer put up an entire tutorial on how they made the game including hacking into what little required code there was (the main event loop).

https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/30 https://love2d.org/

Thank you. This looks great.

I have a few text based games which I write in JS so they can be played on the web. I use an off-the-shelf story format (Ink, though Twine is a popular competitor) and otherwise write the engine myself.

I've started using Unity for some 2d games (and faux isometric ones) and it's a bit of a blackbox but not as much of one as I thought it would be. Still not a fan of their licensing on the asset store though you can publish packages to git and itch.io without EULA nonsense.

This is definitely my guess. People don't sleep as well when they're anxious even if they're in bed the usual amount of time.

> so instead you invest your energy in distraction like television and gaming - which is really a "delay" strategy, not a solving strategy.

Well, technically it's an effective means of social distancing, so in a sense it is doing something meaningful to improve the overall situation, even if psychologically it doesn't feel like that at all. Though one could spend the time better and achieve the same result with less anxiety, as you've suggested.