If it's really simple and you want a community of like-minded individuals, PICO-8 and similar are super fun: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

Definitely more for hobbyist projects, it shares lots of the features that got me into programming in general.

Features:

- the .png image aka "cartridge" also contains all the code to run the game.

- built-in tools for editing code, music, sound, sprites, maps

- community of shared games where all the assets of the game are immediately editable by the players. A game hacker's platform.

That last point can't be overstated. Hear some music you like in a game? You can modify the score and add it to your game. Playing a game but somethings not quite right? You might be able to do the necessary edits with your game controller. Want to "cheat" your way past that last boss? Edit the boss.

It's the sweet spot between playing games and making.

The more serious answer is that it heavily depends on your skills, the goals of your game, and your constraints. Knowing nothing about any of those, Godot seems like the clear winner.

Godot.

The sprite, tilemap and animation blending functionality alone are worth it, just grit your teeth and put up with gdscript (edit - or use C#). And it exports to the web anyway.

You don't have to use GDScript, C# support is very strong at this point.

Fair point.

Unfortunately for me anyway, I'm using the Steam version which doesn't support C#.

Why can't you just download Godot yourself https://godotengine.org/download/windows and grab the 64-bit mono c# version?

I can, I just like using Steam to manage it. I'll probably change in the future, though.

Only use Pygame if you only know Python, refuse to learn another language, you're not planning on working on your project after a week, and you don't ever plan on having other people actually play your game.

Javascript engines are going to be inferior to any proper engine and offer less portability.

All of the above, really. At the risk of worsening your analysis paralysis, another good option is LOVE2D, https://love2d.org/

Depends if you want to sell it or not, plus your target platforms. IIRC Godot is not great at exporting to Switch or other consoles but maybe that has changed.

To add another option to the others, https://www.monogame.net/showcase/ is fairly popular.

It's probably worth running through a tutorial in each and seeing what clicks for you if you have no experience.

There have been several games made with Godot released on Switch recently. The main blocker is Nintendo's NDA's. There's a recent twitter thread[0] from developers of one of those games.

[0]: https://twitter.com/monolithofminds/status/12599133551769272...

Asking the same question myself right now.. I was playing around with Gamemaker Studio yesterday and it seemed ok at first for something simple, but suddenly realized just how stupidly simple it is.. seems like it will be a pain to have any real control and do anything even a little bit complicated.

Yeah, I've heard stories from a number of gamedevs who have said that using Gamemaker for anything other than non trivial projects can get really difficult and messy really fast. Godot is a much more robust engine, while still being pretty beginner friendly.