I agree. Game dev is a very different way to learn to code, and one that's more accessible when you don't have specific guidance.
If you just want to do indie game dev, it's great, but it doesn't transfer and it teaches bad habits without the basis you mention in bits & bytes, data structures & algorithms.
While programming in general is highly abstract & often requires you to form a roughly analogous model of the situation in your head, game-dev programming usually involves you working directly on that model. It's very physical. Move this to that location, shrink those, animate the other, fade that out of existence. It's much easier to see the effect of your code in a game engine than through programming a sorting algorithm and logging the results to console.
For that reason, it's a great way to see if programming might be something you enjoy. It's not a great way to learn programming.
edit: apologies, I didn't see xyzzy_plugh's comment before making my own.
If you just want to do indie game dev, it's great, but it doesn't transfer and it teaches bad habits without the basis you mention in bits & bytes, data structures & algorithms.
While programming in general is highly abstract & often requires you to form a roughly analogous model of the situation in your head, game-dev programming usually involves you working directly on that model. It's very physical. Move this to that location, shrink those, animate the other, fade that out of existence. It's much easier to see the effect of your code in a game engine than through programming a sorting algorithm and logging the results to console.
For that reason, it's a great way to see if programming might be something you enjoy. It's not a great way to learn programming.
edit: apologies, I didn't see xyzzy_plugh's comment before making my own.