I'm also a writer rather than coder but looking at the idea that maybe visual/game based story telling is more my thing. I made my submission (Longinus-3) using Scratch. It's simple but you'll start to feel some of it's limits if you make anything complex. If you decide to check it out, GriffPatch is a youtuber who outright breaks Scratch pushing it way beyond it's intended functions on the regular.
Something of a step up from Scratch is Godot if you don't want to get into Unity or Unreal. Godot is appealing since it's free and has a pretty solid community around it while generally considered the easiest of the three to learn (but I've also heard it has the least tutorials/resources to learn from) while being highly flexible.
If you want mostly 2D games, then Unity or Godot might be the best but since I've heard Unreal is a bit rough in that area. If you are going with 3D games, Unreal is pretty nuts but the other two are both very capable as well (Godot is mostly a 2d engine afaik, but it can do 3D as well).
For making your own graphics, I'd recommend the Complete Blender Creator 3 or GIMP courses (for 3D and 2D art respectively).
Also keep an eye on HumbleBundle. Occasionally they have bundles from GameDev.tv (which is how I got most of my courses from them).
