GDevelop VS pyxel

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

Nice work, gives me very Micro Machines vibes for the NES. The only thing I don't like about PICO-8 is that its completely closed source. An open source alternative that seems very promising is Pyxel. It has similar retro / pixel art limitations, a built-in sprite editor, music tracker, etc.

https://github.com/kitao/pyxel

Just make games with pyxel https://github.com/kitao/pyxel

There's also game engines which are fun to use in python, like pyxel.

A function to automatically generate an application launch URL has been added to Pyxel, a retro game engine for Python (https://github.com/kitao/pyxel please add your star to this repository!).

It's fine. You might also enjoy working with Pyxel, which is a little more pixellated and fun and not exactly "classically production ready" either. (I mean, games like Papers, Please could be programmed in Pygame, but that's about it).

If you like retro games, Pyxel seems nice.