GDevelop VS stencyl-engine

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

as for my 2D engine I am using Stencyl as it has a way to use blocks for programming and you could write out the code if you wanted to, it can create games that can be put in market places as well.

Stencyl is a really easy game engine to use. https://www.stencyl.com/ you can probably bang out a few quick games with it as you follow their tutorials.

Try Stencyl .

He used Stencyl

Stencyl! Build on Scratch but way more capable.

For an easy start in game developing, I would suggest to try GDevelop or Stencyl. Both are an easy option to start from 0. Once you get a grasp on programming logic and how to do some basic things, you can move to other engines if you want to do things in 3D.

Never heard of stencil.. but I have heard of stencyl. Maybe it is a variation of it?

If you're not the sociable type (you'll have to work on that because game making is first and foremost team work, but I understand it might be hard if you feel like you're not skilled enough), a lot of solutions exist to easily make your own games on your own, like Stencyl, or Adventure Game Studio. They'll barely require any technical knowledge, but if you really want to focus on writing, then you can even go with text-only tools such as Twine or Ink/Inky.