[lxdesk]

I say, go back to basics - literally. There are still many "games BASIC" languages around. Some are attached to or reproduce retrocomputing environments like QB64, FreeBASIC and BASIC8(plus a plethora of modern BASICs that target old platforms, like Altirra BASIC, BasiEgaXorz, batari Basic), some are pretty modernized like Cerberus X and AOZ Studio. The thing they all have in common is that they get the tooling and deployment challenges out of the way pretty quickly, and they abstract out enough functionality into APIs that you can start doing flashy things quickly.

For writing a GUI app, look to Python and TK or wx. Those are not too awful to get started with(well, TK particularly, wx is cluttered with boilerplate). Or for a form-editor approach, Lazarus - the current open-source successor to the Pascal lineage.