@kyle Towards this end, I recently used #tic80 for my oldest (a fantasy console). It supports a bunch of languages to write code with, but of those, I'd either go with Lua or Python.
I write retro games as hobby myself, and I have found that a fantasy console like tic80 allows me to prototype out a game idea about 10x faster than using a modern game engine such as Godot.
Hope this helps.