Let me shed some light on the stuff I'm busy with right now. Essentially, I'm pretty serious with making a full fledged VN/adventure game based on Sonic alternative universe. My choice finally fell on Gdevelop 5. It's completely free, have good capabilities for 2D games, pretty straight forward logic, decent amount of education material and alive community. Also it have somewhat integrated Yarn Spinner(dialogs and branching tool), not perfectly integrated but ok-like. So it safe to say Gdevelop checks all the boxes.

The only downside is engines like it (Construct 3 for example) are not "constructors" literally, they just have visualized/generalized language. So the in-game logic elements should be invented and written almost from scratch, even super basic elements like saving the game progress or collecting items. You cannot put a sprite of the key on the screen and call it a collectable item that opens door X if used, nah, ALL the logic should be written down. That fact obviously put me in some amount of grief because things like saves are so mundane yet have a huge amount of finicky logic behind them. I wish I could use pre-made solution.

But what can not be downplayed is the amount of "A-ha!" moments. Reinventing of game logic is really makes your brains flex. Like for this instance:

If I fill just one area with all possible events it will makes this area unmaintainable, so instead I can just create a bunch of "clones" of the said location, each of them will be loaded accordingly changed through the game run global variables. Of course, I'll strongly prefer to have a clone of myself instead to delegate all this game-logic crap and focus on making art and shit! lol 8D

Speaking of which, good news - I finally came to the core story I satisfied with, means it's the time to start writing the real scenario! Boy oh boy, I expect the INSANE amount of work so I probably should pre-plan some little demo version what will help me to draw some attention because it's hard to catch peoples interest if you often missing and have very little to share.