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https://scratch.mit.edu/ is a good one to start with, and it’s easy to move to something like Construct 3. I saw somebody else suggested game maker studio which is a really great choice as well the makers of Crashlands use it and they are just amazing people https://www.bscotch.net/
For serious collaboration you should probably look into GIT and services like GitHub. It's not very intuitive, even scary for some, but it is powerful and very much a standard for letting a group of people work on a common code-base. However, for a father-son project it will probably be easier to just work with Google docs or Dropbox or whatever means you have to share files with each other.
Twine lets you make text based games as easily as you'd make a google doc. It also lets you use HTML and Javascript so you can get as complex as you want with them which is a great way to dip your toes in and gradually feel your way toward the deep end of the pool at your own pace. You can learn about if statements, variables and other programming logic piece by piece without your overall game progress getting bogged down and killing motivation. It's also a fun way to prototype a simple game idea.
As many others have pointed out already, check out Godot, it seems to be a very good fit to what you're asking for.
For serious collaboration you should probably look into GIT and services like GitHub. It's not very intuitive, even scary for some, but it is powerful and very much a standard for letting a group of people work on a common code-base. However, for a father-son project it will probably be easier to just work with Google docs or Dropbox or whatever means you have to share files with each other.