I have been "playing" Dreams Early Access on the PS4 nonstop and it is something else in terms of motivating people to keep going. I never see it discussed much on this sub, but it's by and large my favorite environment to deal with, mostly because of the community aspect but also how much it combines into a single package; everything is done in-engine and sharing stuff is a matter of one single click.
It's got shortcomings too, some people will legitimately hate the motion controls in the editor (which I think are amazing), but many annoying steps are pretty much abstracted away in a manner that allows both veterans and newcomers to get started doing stuff.
What's really breaking my noodle is how even the most complex Dreams, i.e. games, movies, etc. are a couple of MBs max. Your buddy could upload a game and you can play it that very instant. There are no textures or UV maps, which is both a curse and a blessing, but you can (and people do) still make absurdly ridiculous textured doodads and tilesets.
And remixing.
Oh my God, remixing is the best thing ever. Remember when the music industry found sampling? That's what this did for games and interactive experiences, localization... whatever floats your boat. I just scrap through new creations, look for a nice musical phrase someone did and improvise over it or make a track out of it. Or find a static scene someone did and add random interactions. People love it and it's just really rewarding to see that someone made use of your shoddy wooden plank or a destructible car or an isometric view template etc. etc.
And that's with the complete suite of tools, you can do anything you want gameplay-wise (well, except for MMOs and I'd assume that huge crowd sims would be absolutely awful to implement at this point). There is a DAW with tons of pretty amazing and niftily detailed instruments made by Media Molecule. Turning your DualShock4 into an instrument works just so well if you've got any practice with MIDI controllers and it's more than just an afterthought: it is filled to the brim with standard and implicitly intricate functionality you'd expect from expensive audio software.
So I've spent the last two days making a rhythm game template. It's something I loved to hate, mostly because the experience is not consistent across platforms at all and because getting stuff set up can be a chore. Dreams motivates me with its visual language that not only ends up being very efficient to put down, but also fantastic in how easy it is to color-code stuff or make your contraptions modular for people to use in their games.
I've got a working template now I will release soon for people to use that allows you (with a bit of preparation for your music) to instantly turn your tracks into Rockband Unplugged charts. It's been a complete blast, it worked really well and I owe it to the very quick way of doing things in Dreams. At one point you're sketching, then you go back to something else you made, maybe optimize something and reupload the new version. Someone needs help with debugging, dude linked his scene so I take a look, upload the fixed version... there we go.
Imagine if game development could also be a social experience akin to twitter or /r/photoshopbattles and everyone's doing their best to share as much stuff as they can. Curation will be a big part of how well this works too, but the community itself is already there to sort everything out - and it motivates me like nothing ever did before to just go and sketch out my ideas.
Dreams is without a doubt my favorite game development suite. The visuals you can produce with a few clicks and the variety in art-style is very different too, there is so much default polish by virtue of how they designed the engine, which definitely motivates players to keep going at it when nothing really looks too much like programmer art anymore.
The downside here being that I have to get a hold of myself, time is blasting by me when I start up a nice session. But I guess it is kind of a reply to the original question posed: find the tools you like. Explore software if possible, check out tutorials, maybe C++ is a bitch and you really want to switch it up, what with sunk cost and all that.
The other thing is looking at all the crap I have left to do and realizing that nobody else is going to do it for me
This is what prompted me to write this two-page ad for DreamsTM. I think everyone knows that feeling, but this one really blindsided me: people, if provided with the proper infrastructure, would go out of their way to help you out with your stuff. It still takes your work and your mind to complete, but there's something about having a very comprehensive and vast community focusing on one toolset, so to speak - it makes people write-up great tutorials, do videos and collages, some are just curating props into collections you can then conveniently browse, think chairs of all kinds. Motivating one to "just do the work" is one of the toughest things, and I feel like Dreams almost cracked it while striking a close-to-perfect medium between appealing to casual gamedevs and professional artists/anything, really.