I'm keen to learn game development. I have experience with web & react native but would be willing to go canvas/unity if required.
Any ones that stand out that you think would be a good starter game project?
It's a really impressive effort for an open source project. There's a channel on YouTube called KidsCanCode[3] (not just for kids!) which has a load of project-based tutorials to build lots of types of games.
[2] https://github.com/Geequlim/ECMAScript
[3] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNaPQ5uLX5iIEHUCLmfAgKg/pla...
For puzzle games, Set is a good one that will let you practice the UI aspect and recording state, as well as scoring. The PDFs here have the rules, https://www.setgame.com/set/puzzle_rules, and you can play the game at https://www.setgame.com/set/puzzle.
For real-time games, Pong is a great first project and can be followed up by a top-down 2D game (probably a shooter is the most common one). For these you'll need to use Canvas.
Unless you're doing something unusual, the game mechanics are usually not the hard part. A lot more work has to go into polishing it and making a finished product.
I would suggest staying away from Unity in the beginning, it adds a lot of complexity and you'll be able to get started much faster with a bare canvas (which you can easily learn to draw on, and create a game loop with setTimeout or requestAnimationFrame) or React project.
[0] phaser.io
https://nortyspock.github.io/Viktor/
Before that I made asteroids. https://nortyspock.github.io/asteroids-p5/