Indeed there are people who want to make games, and there are people who think they want to make games, but want to make game engines (I'm speaking from experience, having both shipped games and keeping a junk drawer of unreleased game engines).
Shipping a playable game involves so so many things beyond enjoyable programming bits that it's an entirely different challenge.
I think it's telling that there are more Rust game engines than games written in Rust.
I'm in that camp. After shifting from commercial gamedev I've been itching to build something. I kept thinking "I wanna build a game" but couldn't really think what that came is. Then realised "Actually it's because I want to build an engine" haha
Shipping a playable game involves so so many things beyond enjoyable programming bits that it's an entirely different challenge.
I think it's telling that there are more Rust game engines than games written in Rust.