GDevelop VS Phaser

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

Just use an actual game framework https://phaser.io/

Phaser (MIT/JS) https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser

I used the Phaser framework to build the game! I didn't pick it for any particular reason, I just saw that they were offering prizes at the end of the game jam so I thought it'd be a good choice. In hindsight, once again, I should have read the fine print and realized that Phaser is very large for this kind of game jam, but MOVING ON.

Phaser: I've actually used this engine before! It's pretty decent if you're just making small browser games and really easy to use. I taught a programming class to kids aged 10-15 and we used this for a couple of projects. They had no problem making some decent games with it. MIT Licensed and would definitely recommend giving it a go if you want to make something that has the same sort of style as older browser flash games we all used to play on Miniclip and other similar sites.

https://phaser.io/ is a great framework to get started with

I love playing video games, especially console and mobile games. I learned about Phaser (an open source framework for building games with JavaScript) last year and have wanted to try out game development using the skills I already have as a web developer.