Quote Originally Posted by WILL View Post
That's not even taking int account the need for massive amounts of asset and content afterwards.
Assets and contents are definitely hugely time consuming, and there is no "smart" shortcut about them, they're just work, work and more work. If you've got the budget, you can buy models and textures, but you'll aways need to tweak those, and then assemble game levels, etc. which is just plain time-intensive work.

I would say starting with simple vector graphics games (no assets to speak of), or recreating / expanding old games (already existing assets) is much more rewarding, and you can focus on the game itself rather than how it looks.

There is a small place for procedurally generated content, but that only goes so far IME: sooner or later, you'll have hand-tweak it, so it matches a difficulty curve, allows more interesting game mechanics, looks less bland once you're beyond the first few levels, etc. and things are back to work, work and more work :-)