I would highly recommend starting with a fantasy console such as Pico-8 or TIC-80. They remove the temptation to start by building a game engine from scratch, and instead help you focus on actually creating games! Plus they have great communities, complete docs, and simple apis.

Yeah, one of the traps I find myself falling into a lot is that the act of writing code itself can be satisfying enough, and fear (of finishing, complexity and failure) can lead to just spinning your wheels for a long time.

I will keep that in mind, thanks.

My initial research suggest that Godot games are written in C#. Since you use C/SDL2, do you code directly your own OpenGL engine?

> My initial research suggest that Godot games are written in C#

There are a few supported languages (including a custom Python-like language called GDScript). C# is just just one of them.

I don't use OpenGL. I probably should, and this year I'm planning on getting into Blender and 3D (but through Godot) but everything I do in SDL is 2d and sprite based, and SDL handles pushing the triangles/quads on its own.

Also, Godot games are also written in its native scripting language (GDScript) and it supports other languages, although I don't know how well, or how up to date anything is.