My 13yo son recently discovered Godot and I'm very impressed by how accessible and powerful it all is. He had started gamedev a few years ago with Scratch. Figured out Roblox Studio a fair amount, but it's super quirky, plus he wanted to do 2D games. Tried some other stuff (eg pygame) but that's just super low level, inaccessible, plus you can't properly distribute pygame games for shit. Godot is on a whole nother level.

I had never bothered pointing him to it, because I remembered Godot as "a bunch of C++ libraries for gamedev". I'm not even sure whether that's ever been the case or just an incorrect memory, but today's Godot is incomparable to that. The editor UI is very full featured, and you can easily make simple 2D games with relatively small amounts of programming. It includes a level editor, animation stuff, and so on. It's just very feature complete, and I think it's very impressive for a FOSS project to be so accessible to newcomers stumbling into it by chance. Points also to the people making videos.

Also sidenote I think GDScript is great. My son had tried Unity first, but the C# compile cycle was so slow that he kept getting out of the flow. As a developer dad, Godot's GDScript struck me as a super weird "not invented here" thing at first, but realizing what tradeoffs they're going for (familiarity, fast edit-compile-run cycle, concurrency, lightweight binding to C++ internals, etc), I now see the point completely. I'm sure it has plenty quirks but for a beginner like my son it's a perfect fit.

Bottom line, he was able to make a Flappy Bird clone and put it on his Android phone, totally solo (except the Android export, and with lots of YouTube support), in like two afternoons. Drew the art, coded the dynamics, everything. Hats off to the Godot team!