How and when did things start to make sense when you were developing games? I've participated in my first game jam this week, and I'm still following YouTube tutorials on what to do. Every time I attempt to make a game, it always ends up with me having not really learned anything, just regurgitate tutorial code. Does this take years to click? I've been doing this for about a year in bits and pieces, and not having that moment of "oh, I know exactly what I'm doing, and I could implement this feature seamlessly" hasn't hit me in any form.

Writing stuff down on a piece of paper always helps me to get a better grasp of concepts.

Game dev never clicked for me tbh
I just do it cause sometimes it's fun or I get/got paid for it.
Otherwise, I like to just draw, help others with dev or make concepts.
Though must admit, it is satisfying to have your name in a game's credits, especially if you made it yourself.

> Every time I attempt to make a game, it always ends up with me having not really learned anything, just regurgitate tutorial code

If I may give some advice, this likely means you're trying to make games that are too complicated. Don't be afraid to really simplify things and try to make something that is simple enough to do without looking at a tutorial, and build up from there. It won't be sexy and it'll look like slow progress, but you learn a lot more when you learn things in the right order, rather than trying to skip ahead too far and get confused.

Source: wasted many years doing things way beyond my skill level until I admitted to myself that I'm still a noob :)

A year isn't very long to learn anything, really (music, foreign languages, math...). I've been programming for over for almost forty years and I'm still learning every day. Programming was simpler back then, but even so I started out copying and pasting sample code and didn't really feel the light bulb go off over my head until I went through the programming guide for an Apple II+ and then I started to understand what's going on and the cause and effect of every line of code. And present day I still prefer to learn through text tutorials, not video, so I can go at my own pace and focus on understanding each line of code, and browse reference materials so I know where to come back if I need more info (sometimes the reference manuals are the best place to learn a language or tool).

But there's no single right approach for everyone, so you should try different approaches (and tools and types of projects) and go with what works for you. The important thing is to find a way that you enjoy and find interesting, otherwise it's hard to get motivated to put in the necessary time. Taking a break is not a bad idea. It took me a long time to find a game engine I wanted to get started with for my own projects (that was Unity back when it was version 1.5) and then after ten years I didn't want to look at Unity again, so I've just been dabbling with other game engines the past couple of years just to see what else is out there, and now I'm slowly getting into the mood to learn Godot. Along the way I've also learned there are areas I'm just not interested in, like server programming, or what constitutes AI these days, so I try to spend my time on what I like doing.

Literally this weekend during a game jam I knew every line of code to write and barely had any errors or had to look anything up for the first time ever. It is quite a feeling, so I'd definitely say something clicked. This is of course after doing 4-5 jams a month for a while and watching hundreds of tutorials (years of coding experience too).

I'd say it also heavily depends on your planning. If you know how the mechanics you are going to code are going to work and interact with the rest of your project, you will have a much better time coding them (guessing and checking is beyond frustrating at times and usually you will just be staring at the screen erasing and re-writing the same code blocks).

Overall its like any skill and it will definitely click at some point. You have to continuously practice and learn how to do things (making one game here or there isn't going to do much for fully understanding how it all works together).