I'm a crazy person, I lack the skills needed to be a designer but I'm an experienced programmer.

I currently work as web dev at a company but I've had in-depth experience with most mainstream languages, C# is my favorite.

Another thing that makes me crazy is that tutorials don't help me, I need to see it happen before me, so that I can repeat it and learn from it.

I've tried starting with Unity but it looks complex and it requires you to be a designer or atleast pull assets from somewhere.

What should I do?

So find one of the millions of people who want to design games but have no programming skills, and team up.

Just use boxes, this is what progammers do.

What kind of game can you make in a reasonable short time ?

As always I recommend setting yourself the challenge of making a text-based game. The reason for this is that all you need is your language of choice(C# in your case) and your skill as a programmer.

If you can make an immersive experience with just text, then chances are you are a game designer at heart. Great places to start are "text adventures" such as Zork or The Hobbit, where you type in commands such as "> talk to Gandalf" or those old adventure game books such as the Fighting Fantasy or "Way of the Tiger" series. You might do a mixture of both or just do your own thing entirely. Add in features such as saving and loading games etc.

Once you have a text-game under your belt, look into a visual experience and say "With just keyboard and mouse input, and the ability to put an image on the screen...what could I do next?". An excellent second project is to take your first game and give it a GUI make-over. With WindowsAPI, Java's AWT/Swing etc - its a good progression.

Anyway, best of luck matey! ^_^

Do what I do. Google up creative commons free assets and use them, stick to coding if it's what you're good at. There are lots of free sites out there to get you started, opengameart.org for example and freesfx.co.uk.

Good luck!

I am the same way (programmer, no design skills), and I found that the perfect match was C# and SFML.net to provide basic graphics/sound/input functionality. I found SFML very intuitive and natural, and while it won't give you the large scale game architecture support that game development libraries might, it gives you what you need, which makes things very easy at the start. And, considering myself a programmer more than a game-developer, I prefer working at the level of abstraction that you get with SFML. Unity was too high level for me because it abstracted away so much of the programming that nothing made sense.

Now start off simple with something like Pong, just to get your feet wet, moving on to things like Space Invaders.

I think a great 3rd/4th project that will really expand your abilities is a shmup (Shoot-Em-Up, think Galaga or something similar). A Shmup will get you into animations, more complicated collision detection (without complicating things too much with complex physics), audio, game states, multiple levels and all kinds of other things if you want to take it that far.

With the early projects though remember that you are trying to learn at this point, so pick new projects for what they can teach you.

The asset store is your best friend. Grab some of those free art packs like this one

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/8312

and make yourself some demos/prototypes to learn and figure out what kinda game you want to make.

Then upgrade yourself to the full pack from the same company or anyone of the full game art kits on the store.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/7101

You can find Unity books and tutorials all over the place, lots are free, some are not. I'd start with a good book that was released in the last few months that mentions Unity 5 and get cracking with your new found art pack. Good luck, also unity3d.com/learn has a ridiculous amount of content.