I feel you. I have some friends interested but they don't want to actually do the work. I'll submit ideas for games and actually implement those ideas (even if they suck). But my friends feign interest and just give creative thoughts without rolling up their sleeves and learning the engine or doing any work. Even though they are programmers for their day job.
I have one friend who seemed interested, and I showed him around the software for about 15 min and he was like "that's good enough for the day I think". I facepalmed and was just like... "yeah... we can do more later" knowing full well that wouldn't happen.
I'd love to get into learning game development but I'm poor and all the software on HumbleBundle and Itch.io seem to cost money. Know any good free options?
You can use Unity and the Unreal Engine. The base version of those engines are free and are really powerful. I'm using the free version of unity and I already have a playable build of my game and plus there's a lot of tutorials on youtube for both so it's easy to jump into it
https://unity.com/download this is the link. It downloads the Unity hub where you can access your projects and different builds of the engine. I think under installs on the hub you can download the engine itself