It's been mentioned a few other places in the comments here, but I recommend PICO-8 for beginning game developers. It's a really well-designed fantasy console, so it feels like you're actually developing for specific hardware due to the limits. But you're programming in Lua with an easy-to-use API, and you can make the entire game using PICO-8, since it has a code editor, sprite editor, map editor, sound fx editor, and music editor. It's a really nice experience -- I think this is the primary reason people love it and you hear so much about it.

If you want a less-restrictive game dev system or can't afford the (well worth it!) $15 for Pico-8, there are many great free methods, like LÖVE (also uses Lua), Godot (GDScript or C#), Phaser (js), and so on.