I've been programming for a while now, however most of my experience has been on the side of Python and generally for building scientific models related to my profession…Over the past year or so I've started to get the bug to explore game development again, I've dabbled with it in the past and always found it fun. But it was never something that I could afford to focus on at the time. After a recent job change a couple years ago, I've had significantly more time on my hands and have started exploring different hobbies. Now after a while of watching all sorts of different videos on game development, and messing around with different tutorials, I think I want to give a semi-serious try.

These two games are 2-D long duration RTS games, a game can last 30-60 days normally, and you just check in a few times a day to do standard RTS things. Can play it either on your browser or as an app.

I've played Conflict of Nations and Call of War since their release, and they are both games I've always found incredibly fun and enjoyable. So as I'm venturing into this more, I want to go in a direction that would ultimately allow me to make something like that. I'm not crazy though, and I fully understand that's a massive commitment and no small task, I don't ever see myself making something to that scale nor that refined…But maybe something more stripped down that I can host on my website or even publish as an app some day, and convince those in my community to play.

Where would I begin to do something like this? I've got a lot of very small projects in mind that would allow me to continually build up to this, but I just don't want to waste time building this using say react native (one of the options I'm looking at), only to learn that there's an engine or framework that would make this significantly easier. From what I can tell, there's a lot of different options I could go with. Thanks for any help!

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As you noted already, there's a lot of different options listed there. You should probably fiddle around with some of them until you find one you like. As you're beginning and run into more questions, feel free to ask them here in the For Beginners forum. You've come to the right place.

@NotThunder Maybe look at something like Noesis Gui. The ‘problem’ with React is that you're basically stuck with using JS, and without a (major) game engine. So you wind up with something more like a website than a game.

@m_waddams Hmm ok, I've checked this out a bit, and it seems almost like it's to much for what I need. Obviously I know nothing about building front-ends and how to make clean GUIs, but it seems that the client side of a game like this is basically just a glorified website? Just point and click on things, and the real fun is in the strategy. It seems like the majority of the leg work is on the backend. Or am I just misunderstanding how this works? Although I do see what you're saying with react, I would be hard stuck if the front-end of things is more complex than I'm giving it credit for. This is just my observations from trying to understand how a game like this can be built.

@NotThunder React lends itself extremely well for websites. So if your game is basically a website, and you're comfortable with JS, it's a good choice. I mentioned Noesis just to note that it might be better to separate the Gui from the backend. React forces you to use JS without an engine, not a choice many game developers will make 🙂

@NotThunder If you just want to start making something game-like, I think it's fair to just use a bit of html eventually canvas/svg. Js isn't so bad - you can use an ECMA standard checker, babel or even compile to ECMA from ts.
Just start with something pure - no libraries.

If eventually you want to use react, that's actually not so bad for games either. Sure, you'd still have to make the engine around it yourself, but it can pretty useful. Lots of web games are really just SPAs.

But I'm suggesting that you start small - without an engine , libraries or a backend, and just write small browser games. It's different from python in a lot of ways, so even though you're experienced, it's nice to start small and get acquainted with the tools.