Godot. Its the perfect time to pick a popular open source one that is very robust. Pick Godot. I truly believe it is more intuitive than Unity and sometimes even Unreal Engine. Just follow the official tutorials on the website to get started and once you understand how it works you can get pretty crazy with it.

Godot is fantastic, supports linux natively, and it’s FOSS; highly recommend it.

Scratch /s

Honestly try whatever you want, from Godot to bash on the command line (I’m not even joking) then while doing so, write down what you learn and, as importantly, what is missing. If something is missing and it’s a very VERY big deal for you to re-implement (say 3D engine, or VR support, or cross platform support) then and ONLY THEN do look at other engines. See which ones out there do have both what you needed so far AND what is missing. Do NOT think ahead of all the “cool” things you “might need one day” because you would then look for the “perfect” engine for a project that does not even exist in your mind.

TL;DR: it does not matter, pick any, build, share, iterate and pick another one whenever you want to.

All the game engines work on Linux. Movie studios use Unreal, Blender, and Epic for the big budget stuff now, and (unless someone has new info) everything is rendered on Linux farms.

That being said, I would suggest Godot to just get a simple project going. Lots of HUGE games came off Godot in the past couple years. Balatro was made in Love2D as well. Both are about as simple to learn and portable as you can get.

I’ll pick Godot as well. Started using it recently and its been a pretty smooth learning experience.

Godot or if you like Lua, Love2D (engine used for balatro) are solid options to get started with.

Ive tried Godot and discovered I cant code at all, everything was hanging together by a thread.

Ive since started GDevelop and am loving it, they even have an official flatpak.

Everyone says Godot, but I disagree. Godot is too high level and it won’t teach you much about how it all works. Godot is good if you have already mastered languages and common gaming algorithms (e.g. collisions), and you just want to get going. But as a first foray, I’d say, go with SDL. After you done something simple in SDL and learned some hands on knowledge on how things work under the hood, go with Godot. That knowledge will help you troubleshoot godot better then.

I’ve heard good things about GameMaker (the engine Hotline Miami 1 and 2 use) for beginner devs. It’s hard to recommend an engine without knowing how familiar you are with scripting. GameMaker is 2D-only and isn’t free though.

Godot can be very confusing if you aren’t much of a coder or have trouble with complex workflows. But one thing it does very well is allow you to get a barebones structure up and running quickly, and that really helps with setting up scenes and iterating on them. So if that sounds like your thing, Godot is free and can do 3D as well as 2D.

If you’re looking at collaborating in game jams, you’ll find it handy to have some Unity, Unreal Engine and Godot under your belt. Don’t worry about becoming an “expert” at any of them, just do a few intro tutorials and read the starter docs on each.

Solarus