I've been thinking a lot recently about game development, what it means to me, my motivations, and what things are important to me when I do it. I never really feel like I fit in with other developers because the way I go about things is so different (though there's also some pretty big demographic differences in play too; some communities have some major problems with lack of diversity). But I think the best way to respond to that is to just embrace the stuff that sets me apart even more.
I feel like game dev is really personal for me. It's art that I make out of passion for my favorite things, and my own characters and worlds (like how fangame authors are passionate about the series they're making a game about, except it's my own stuff!) and the idea of treating anything made like that like a product feels really uncomfortable, like it's discarding that personal aspect and making it more corporate.
Not to say that doing commercial stuff is bad or anything, and you can definitely accomplish a lot more and execute an idea to its fullest when you can give it a budget. But for me it's deliberately just something I do for fun.
And then there's the aspects of how I target retro consoles for a lot of my projects. I think it's often done out of some form of nostalgia I don't share myself. Other people often have a lot of emphasis on game boxes, manuals, and dedicated carts, and I get the impression they're trying to replicate the feel of buying a new game in the 80s, which I never got to do because I was born in the mid-90s. I had loose carts and emulators, and while I had fun looking at manuals for GameCube games I got, I don't think it was an important part of the experience for me? I guess a lot of it is the whole game collector mindset, which I associate with a lot of really gross stuff like not doing another run of a cart-only game to please collectors, or preventing prototypes from being dumped. The idea of treating something I made like an investment feels super gross, which is one reason I'll probably only give carts to friends if I ever make any.
For me, I really love old consoles for their game libraries and the neat aesthetics that their hardware limitations brought about, and the roles those consoles played in gaming history. I'm really fascinated by the SNES and Genesis especially, and the whole idea of animal platformer mascot characters, which is why Nova is one. It's also magical to see something I programmed running on the same hardware as games that are really important to me - sometimes the exact same console I had as a kid. I get to work with the same console features that games I love did, and have a very personal experience with the hardware, and end up with game design that wouldn't have happened if not for those features/limitations.
I've also ended up really embracing the idea that this is an opportunity to give old consoles new games that are more accessible than the original library originally was. I don't think this is something other homebrew developers really factor in, or at least I haven't seen people talk about it, though I have seen people willingly go for copying some of the inaccessible design choices for I think nostalgia reasons? And for them it's just a fun nostalgic aesthetic thing, but for other people it just locks them out of having some experiences they could've enjoyed.
I have at least one friend who loves old consoles, but can't always press buttons consistently or fast enough due to disabilities, so games that punish mistakes too harshly (especially by having a lives/game over system that takes away a large amount of progress) mean that she just can't complete those games without cheats. So I try to keep people like her in mind when I do game design. I also try to make sure that nothing is differentiated from anything else only by color when I can, though I'm definitely guilty of that sometimes on NES where palette swaps can be hard to avoid. But my Dr.Mario clone for NES definitely did take some precautions to be color blind friendly.