A fairly common way is to first implement experimental gameplay logic in a scripting- or visual-language, and once it works, extract the performance-critical parts into "proper" C++. Basically, the common lower level gameplay building blocks are written in C++, glued together by some higher level mechanism (like noodle graphs or a scripting language, and common features move into C++ as needed). Unless it's Unity, in that case, replace C++ with C#.