Which is somewhat ironic, because I know that “sit and just do it” is the ideal start. Think less about choosing, just pick it up and go.
But I end up spending more time looking up things and getting excited about them.
LOVE2D? Oooh, it’s lua! It can even run on Android! DragonRuby? Oooh, simple and lightweight and fast! Oh wait, Godot just had a new update! Hey, maybe I should get back to programming Java, libGDX looks neat! Damn, Raylib feels like it does many things right! And on it goes…
I overwhelm myself with choices, start a bit then abandon at the second hard-ish hurdle (like menu/interface showing under the map despite lots of fiddling with the Z position, in Godot). So, yeah, just exposing my problem, I suspect I’m not alone in this.
Every engine is going to come with engine specific problems. You will also come against many general game development problems, for which the engines have come up with many different creative solutions.
I can’t make it any simpler for you. You will waste a bunch of time learning stuff. The only way to avoid that is literally building your own engine that conforms to your expectations and assumptions, because noone else can do that.
There are so many invisible boring-ish problems. Ui, scaling, networking, instancing, level changing, loading screens, even scheduling etc. You need to learn to love the boring stuff, because it comes at a 10-1 ratio towards the fun-ish creative problems.
However it’s best to start wasting that time today than next week.