Many years ago, when I first began learning about programming, I built the Shark Byte minigame using the Scratch platform. With a little practical experience under my belt, I followed it up with a top-down shooter called Hittoriko Hunter. It’s a progressive shooter that uses character sprites from the original Tamagotchi games.
Scratch was a great launchpad for learning concepts like loops and conditional statements.
The timing for the gun reloads, the info messages, and the variety of enemy movements were all things I recall struggling with. While it’s not the most sophisticated game, I think it does a good job of entertaining for five minutes.