Because of all the hype about Godot I tried it recently and I was really pleasantly surprised. Particularly Godot 4 is a real joy to create little games with. Went down the rabbit hole to build something with my kids and we found it highly enjoyable.
Only sad aspect is that I eventually converted to Godot 4 and now I'm stuck with it, but can't publish it for them on iOS because that part is broken for a few months now.
My oldest is reaching the age where they're requesting very specific games of an appropriate starting difficulty for something like Godot ("I want a DDR game but with my made up character"). Can I ask for any suggestions you've got regarding making a small game with your kids?
There are a lot of things to learn in Godot. I leaned mostly on their own documentation and maybe a few YT videos here and there for certain effects.
I would very much recommend 2d to start, there was a lot of fiddling with trigonometry to get the camera and things working in 3d. Really not hard but might be frustrating for a kid if they haven't been exposed to math like that yet.
Other than that, just get started. I would recommend finding examples of similar games before you start. For my second game I just took the FPS tutorial and hacked at it until it did what I wanted. Much easier than starting from scratch and lets you dip your toes into the concepts you need to while being able to ignore the rest for now.
I think I had copy/pasted some code for a 3rd Person Follower camera and I just needed to mess with the negative signs to make sure left was left and right was right.
But yes, you can certainly get away with very little math even in 3d games.
It started with the kids wanting a specific game that they saw in a hotel somewhere but was bespoke. So we tried recreating it. Generally 2D things are relatively simple, and if you can get away with using the built-in physics system then even more so.
I'm not sure how much direct feedback I can give but splitting up art and programming (oldest sits next to me and gives me instructions) is quite fun. What makes Godot particularly fun at this is that you can poke around in the inspector as the game is running for fast iterations and changes.
This is really fascinating. I'd wanted a similar mode in many simulation-style games ever since I was a child, trying to record a video detonating TNT in a Minecraft world.
I've loved Godot since 2, and I didn't even know this was on the radar. Good stuff!
Only sad aspect is that I eventually converted to Godot 4 and now I'm stuck with it, but can't publish it for them on iOS because that part is broken for a few months now.