On sorta the same topic:
In the programming world I feel like there's a lot of info "for beginners" and a lot of folks / activities for experts.
But that middle ground world is strange... a lot of it is a combo of filling in "basics" and also touching more advanced topics at the same time and the amount of content and just activities filling that in seems very low. I get it though, the middle ground skilled audience is a great mix of what they do or do not know / can or can not solve.
I don't know if that made any sense.
CodeWars has a nice Kata grading system that features many intermediate level problems.
- Unity seems promising but they have a weird version of mono running things and not so recent C# features available. Might be a non issue.
- Godot seems more promising for my use case but I feel like they want you to use GDScript. I don't want to use GDScript while there is a perfectly capable C# engine there. Is .NET second class in Godot?
- MonoGame was basically abandoned for a long time. I wonder if it got any better. That might be a little too much "code first" though.
Stride.. I just heard it the first time ever. Its a shame. And apparently it is a proven engine especially in VR space. Jumped on it, unfortunately no macOS support available so can't dig in right now.
I would strongly suggest that for quick code-first prototypes. The boiler-plate of "load a texture and render to screen" is quite minimal - you could perhaps make a small library for yourself?
It also has no opinions about how you structure your game data. This means you can represent things like a Flappy Bird clone as just a `Vector2`, rather than having to bash a graph of entities in the shape you want.