Take a look at Slint or Avalonia if you miss this experience.

And I'll take needing an internet connection over having to install Visual Basic from a stack of CDs.

I'm still not great at it, but the biggest thing that helped me was to give myself a rule, "Don't talk about what I'm planning, only talk about what I've done". Explaining a project's vision or goals give my brain a mini-version of the feeling of accomplishment of actually doing it, and I found that I would use that as a replacement for actually building stuff (which is much more work). Instead, if I only talk about the parts that I've completed, it's very motivating to build the next step so that I can share it. It also gave me more flexibility to change course during a project.

I've been playing with this engine for a while. I really like the engine. For me the best features are:

- Scripting is really ergonomic, and fairly fast performance-wise. And if you need something to be really fast writing native extension modules for wren is pretty straightforward. So it's a choice between "reasonable" perf scripting and "fast" native code, which is much better than something like Unity where everything is kind of in the middle.

- Wren fibers (a form of cooperative threading) are fantastic for dealing with game logic (NPC state, game AI, etc) without introducing the complexity of true multithreading.

- The graphics/render module is extremely configurable. The whole render module is just a script that sets up a fast c++ execution graph, and you can modify/script this.

- The tools are very nice and a lot of care put into them. I don't use the editor too much, and mostly interact through code, but for things like level design it's really nice to have.

- Many game engines feel like a good fit for a large project or a small one but not both. Luxe is great for small jam games and full-sized projects. A project can be pretty much just a project file, a few configs and a script, or a large structure and the editor encourages (but doesn't enforce) a good project layout.

- Drawing is super flexible. You've got sprites and shapes and meshes and tiles and everything, but there's also an "immediate style" drawing api that is very high quality. Similar to having "Shapes" extension in unity but it's a first class citizen and built in.

- The "Modifiers" (which is Luxe's ECS-like component thing) took me a while to get used to using, and can be a source of friction at first, but once I got it it really feels like a better way to do things. And it's entirely optional so you don't have to if you're still learning.

- Outside of code and raw assets like images and mesh, almost everything is stored in ".lx" files which are very json-like, which can be really helpful for debugging and understanding what's going on, and on many occasions I've been able to automate stuff from script just by writing out or modifying lx files.

- Features and fixes are added constantly, but done carefully in a way that doesn't break existing code too often or without a clear migration strategy (glares at bevy).

It feels like an engine built for small teams and experimental workflows. Especially if you're looking for alternatives to Unity, I'd recommend it.