I'm keen to learn game development. I have experience with web & react native but would be willing to go canvas/unity if required.
Any ones that stand out that you think would be a good starter game project?
Godot[1] is free and open source, similar to Unity, builds to mobile, desktop and web. It supports 2D and 3D, as well as VR through some addons. It has a built in python-like scripting language called GDScript that's easy to pick up and understand, and you can also use C#, C++ or many other languages through bindings (even Javascript[2]).
It's a really impressive effort for an open source project. There's a channel on YouTube called KidsCanCode[3] (not just for kids!) which has a load of project-based tutorials to build lots of types of games.
Yup, I was hoping for some game titles that would be easy to introduce. I’d pick the stack/engine based on the game.
Grateful for the other advice still.
For real-time games, Pong is a great first project and can be followed up by a top-down 2D game (probably a shooter is the most common one). For these you'll need to use Canvas.
Unless you're doing something unusual, the game mechanics are usually not the hard part. A lot more work has to go into polishing it and making a finished product.
I would suggest staying away from Unity in the beginning, it adds a lot of complexity and you'll be able to get started much faster with a bare canvas (which you can easily learn to draw on, and create a game loop with setTimeout or requestAnimationFrame) or React project.
