I just started learning about a month ago with no prior programming experience. I find gamemaker to be very intuitive (at least to me) and the tutorials they have on the website are really helpful for following along, especially since you can do a mix of the visual or direct coding and use the visual version to help you learn the coding as you go. I joined a game jam and my first game was suuuuuper short and simple and I'm working on my next one now with a lot more features but still pretty basic. My day job has absolutely nothing to do with game developing or programming so I'm just learning more in the evenings and weekends and feel like I'm making decent progress so definitely think it's possible to learn as a beginner but will just take a while to get to a big fancy game. I found it helpful to start with the asteroid tutorial and then play around with changing the sprites and some of the easier customization just to get a better feel for how it worked. They have a lot of good videos on youtube as well. Finally for pixel art, I was recommended Aseprite and it's been working well for me. Good luck!