If you end up going in the Godot direction, a friend of mine has some useful tools to easily get started on animation rigging and controllers here.

He got started a couple years ago with no game dev experience, and he’s done a couple of game jams recently, but most of his time has been spent building workflow tools. A couple months ago he finally got around working on one of the original games that he’s wanted to make since he started.

It’s not as impressive as some of the other projects mentioned here, but there was a one-year hiatus during the filming of Cast Away to allow Tom Hanks to lose all (and more) of the weight he had gained for the first part of the movie. His beard and tan were earned honestly during that time as well.