What is the best game engine/framework for a absolute beginner to learn?
So ive tried to code many times on my own but i feel like im doing things the hard way and im still unsure what to pick becasue ive been jumping around here and there. like most gamers i would like to try to make a game or something but im just not sure if i can or not becasue it seems really hard to do and im not sur eif ill enjoy it or not also my pc is low end so im kinda limited to say.
Considering you have a low end pc i'd recommend trying godot. As someone who has been in the gamejam scenes for few years now I have seen it be used more and more. It is not the most powerful engine, especially compared to unity and unreal. It however is by far the easiest both on user experience and on computer resources. As a bonus it is fully free and open source, which is always nice. For the learning part I'd recommend just starting, being bad at something is the first step in being kinda good at something (this is a quote from somewhere, and i dont remember from where). Good luck!
If you do end up going this way we have a nice little community forming over at [email protected] (direct link) fyi. I'm pretty new to the engine too and it's been a learning curve but ultimately anything you choose will be a learning curve.
I'd say take the latest stable one, which atm is 4.0.3. they released their major rewrite(version 4) a few months ago, but for now they still support version 3. Considering you are starting from scratch i'd say just go for 4.
I have never used their tutorials myself (went about with only the public docs, and looking at other projects), but they have an entire page dedicated to it https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/community/tutorials.html. Feel free to take any one there.
Might be worth considering Defold? It's component/object model is pretty simple, the programming language is Lua (which is compiled with LuaJIT, so it's fairly performant), the documentation is good and while the community isn't huge, it's very vibrant. Crucially, it's used to make very real commercial mobile games, so you know it's battle-tested.
It also builds to absolutely EVERYTHING so no matter where you want to distribute your games, it's got you covered.
I'm personally very smitten by it, although I used to work with the devs back when they were part of King, so I'm slightly biased. They are an AWESOME group of people.
Defitely Godot, especially having a low-end PC. The language, Gdscript is very python-esque, so the entry bar is low. Really, a couple of years ago I tried Unity and that thing wouldn't load even if my life depended on it haha, Godot's load times were pretty much instantaneous.
And there are tons of resources to learning either through YouTube or their official documentation :)
I recommend you start with the oficial documentation "Introduction to Godot" and their "Your first 2D game" sections, If you wanna see quick results you may start with the latter.
If you don't mind some self-promotion, you could also give a look to a couple of FOSS games I've built using the engine, I made them for short game-james so all of them are pretty simple, feel free to use them however may be best to you :)
I made my first games in GameMaker: Studio, and it was very good for it, back then. Not sure if it's as good anymore with the 2.0 version, but it may be worth a shot. With it you can do as much or as little code as you want.
Godot and Unity never clicked with me, but both are good options. They have a steeper learning curve, though.
If you have some comfort with coding, TIC-80 and PICO-8 are great options, with a simple Lua API, big community, and built-in editing tools. Lets you have a lot of control over your game without needing to learn the strange things about major editors.
Python, love2d, unreal, unity but unity and unreal are too powerful for my pc and i barely tried godot, love2d, pyhton i just felt overwhelmed and such.
How much programming experience do you have? You might want to start extra small with some games that are just played in the terminal, like tic tac toe, battleship, and hangman to practice good object oriented programming in a small project before you move on to Unity or Godot. You really need to understand object oriented programming well because Unity has some very complex classes, you are expected to understand inheritance, and so on.
When you do start with Godot or Unity start with a Mario clone, keep it really simple and finish the project.
I'd suggest Löve, which uses Lua. It's a powerful language but equally easy to learn. You could also try Pico8, which is also a version of Lua. It's presented as if it's an old 8-bit microcomputer with a built in sprite and tile editor. I find Pico8 much more approachable for beginners. Python is another good starting point for low end hardware.