GDevelop VS BabylonJS

5 × GDevelop Gold license for 12 months

https://gdevelop.io/ <- free, very easy

It's not as monolithic as you'd think. There are lots of engines out there but their communities aren't very vocal compared to Unity, Unreal, and especially Godot's community.

Take a look at: https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-projects

And

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-generous-space-of-al...

If you look at both of these you'll see just how many engines there are and neither of these cover everything. There are plenty of engines popular in the Python community that no one outside of it are aware of. Such as Arcade [0], Python-Tcod [1], Ursina [2], UPBGE [3], and Panda3D [4]. But based on your description you'd really like https://gdevelop.io/. It embraces exactly what you're describing where you can build a game but just installing entire features others have made and put online into your game.

[0] Beginner friendly 2D library:

[1] Rougelike: https://python-tcod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[2] Beginner friendly 3D engine (built on Panda3D): https://www.ursinaengine.org/

[3] Blender Game Engine Fork: https://upbge.org/

[4] Highly flexible code first 3D engine: https://panda3d.org/

I'm not really a game maker, but would like to give a shout out to the fabulous https://gdevelop.io/

It has everything you need, is free and its VISUAL PROGRAMMING is fab...

After they switched to a monthly/annual subscription fee with the release of construct 3, I pretty much threw in the towel and switched over to Gdevelop.

https://github.com/4ian/GDevelop

Open source, completely free, and I can run it as a native application on my computer versus a weird web app. The idea that my game is basically tied to a SaaS is just not OK for me.

gdevelop GitHub releases

It's been around for a while, and we've featured it in the April 2019 and March 2022 Release Radars. It's also been in GitHub Game Bytes and on our latest episode of The Download. Yes, I'm talking about Babylon, the powerful web rendering engine for all kinds of graphics. The newest update includes support for basic Global Illumination, a highly requested feature. Read more about other cool new additions including Gaussian Splatting, Ragdoll physics, Procedural Geometry and all the breaking changes in the Babylon release notes.

Wow that site is super cool! So I see most of the 3D stuff is using canvas, maybe three.js or babylon.js or possibly pixi.js.

Sure; I've used [Phaser](https://phaser.io/) before for a game jam like project and I've heard of [PixiJS](https://pixijs.com/) and [Babylon.js](https://www.babylonjs.com/) as options too. I can't really give a good recommendation either way; Phaser was fun to just write TypeScript and see my game, but it felt like a toy compared to Unreal. I'm sure you could really push it to its limits though. You mentioned you know about LibGDX; I don't have experience with it, but it does seem like a viable option.

I’ve only messed around with it a bit, but https://www.babylonjs.com seems impressive