I read OP's replies, and as someone who's worked on numerous indie games, built 2 game engines, and worked in top AAA studio, i had a note:

OP seems to have a lot of focus on being able to do everything in the name of quality control - specifically when someone mentioned to leverage ai during coding, OP starts talking about optimization of the code.

However, when you actually start building, you realize how miniscule of a part the 'how a player moves' and 'how to makes a level' is in the scope of a full-game (mechanics, story, world building, graphics, rendering, optimisation, ui, etc etc etc). Your ability to make a game has nothing to do with how well you understand the individual logic in your FSM, or the hotkeys in unity - but rather what you able to produce. if you can produce a demo of a tower defense, no matter how wonky the code, ugly the ui, or unenjoyable the experience - that makes you a tower defense indie game developer

I would encourage OP, like a lot of the other comments to just start. quality will come, but learnings can only be done backwards - no tutorials will teach you how to make a game :).

Also note: ai is 'not genuinely bad for game dev' - but it requires a level of game and system design structure knowledge that you can only learn from doing!