I reccomend trying out GB studio. It makes gameboy games and comes as one binary file. Not too crazy to learn. I liked the music player thing.

I’m a hobbyist game dev also. Main advice would be that yes it is a lot of work and you may suck at everything, but the only way to get any better is to get started.

Pick an engine, it really doesn’t matter which for the most part (I used to use Unity and recently switched to Godot, the way people evangelise the latter can be a bit offputting but as an objective user of both I can say they’ve got pros and cons like anything else). The exception being if you want to make a very specific kind of game like visual novels for example, then you’d be best served learning Ren’Py since that’s what the engine is for.

Other than that, get something installed and hunt down some tutorials for it. Doesn’t matter if they’re irrelevant to what you hope you’ll one day make, you’re just trying to learn the basics here. Take what you learn in tutorials, and modify it in some way, that helps things sink in better and gives you more understanding about what your code (or your blender animation, or whatever) is actually doing and how it works.

TLDR: Just get stuck in!

p.s. there’s a few general “gamedev” communities on here so far but I think the most active one is !gamedev@lemmy.blahaj.zone (direct link). Check out the pinned post in there with links to neighbours like engine-specific communities etc. Someone is also organising a Fediverse game jam for next month so that could be a good way to join a team and get started doing small tasks on a game that you wouldn’t be able to make yourself yet.

Python with PyGame can be quite a good start. And if you’re just trying to build something for fun maybe use free assets from the internet.