GDevelop VS learn-gdscript

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

When I see someone wanting to start out and knowing nothing at all I do not point them at the 20 games challenge. I first point them at something like this: GDquest GDscript for total beginners . It at least attempts to teach some absolute basics as well as abstracting/hiding away useless and confusing framework you really don't want to be occupied with when learning from zero. But it's also guilty of assuming knowledge in some areas. That is sadly unavoidable. It also teaches almost nothing about object oriented design. (Something that should be looked up if you're working in an engine that has this as it's central design philosophy)

You can use this to learn GDScript https://gdquest.github.io/learn-gdscript/

Do you have any experience with programming? If not, you may want to start here https://gdquest.github.io/learn-gdscript/

If you have never done basic fundamental programming you can begin with https://gdquest.github.io/learn-gdscript/ , while this still hasn't been updated to Godot 4.0, it is universal enough not to be a problem.