Honestly, if you really want to build a game, if you’re somehow passionate about this or just really want to understand how game creation works, i would just go for learning a bit of programmation. Unity is really great about that, it uses C#, which is a language that is used a lot and can be used for almost anything, from video games, to apps, softwares, websites, and is one of the languages that is both not too hard to use, and prevent you from doing a lot of mistakes (like trying to use a number for something that needs a text for example).
A lot of stuffs can be done without code, directly in unity editor, or with a mix of code and editor uses, freeing you from most graphic engine scripting which is in my opinion one of the hardest things in coding (Just like in maths, i always hated calculating geometric stuffs using only numbers and no actual representation whatsoever).
Most of the time, for simple games and for simple prototypes of complicated games, you’ll end up with a very, very low amount of code to write.
(I am currently creating a somehow “complex” game, which is a different story, sometimes I need breaks from creating “complex” scripts, and would gladly accept if you ask, to help you with your game from times to times as writing simpler scripts feels really refreshing. On top of that, the type of code required for the kind of game you want is the one that kind of is obvious to create (not always easy to do, but always easy to find what you want to do).
Unity somehow is one of the standard in the game industry, and an enormous community puts a lot of questions, answers and tutorials on the web. Once you get a little grasp on how to use unity, you’ll always find how to do what you want to do by just asking the question to google, and your knowledge about unity will most of the time find uses in other programs and games.
I started just like you, (well, i knew just a bit of html and php, but really a tiny bit), it was a bit hard sometimes, but never totally impossible, and i really advise you to just try to learn unity and c# a bit, and create your prototype in it. If you make it with a smaller and simpler engines or scripting stuff designed to beginner, there are great chances you’ll get stuck as you’ll try to make a real game out of it, and will have to learn what you tried to avoid in the first place.
