A good way to do a hobby or "learning project" is to compartmentalize your game. A simple (if boring) way to do this is to have 1 or 2 room sections, that need to be 100% completed before you can move on. Now some cool game design decisions can spice this up but I think u my see my point.
When u are working on a game yourself, and doing all the aspects it is VERY easy to end up with such a huge work load that you nvr get anything finished, or even worse no matter how much you finish, you never seam to have made any progress as there is still so much more to do. This is very true if you attempt a wider open environment, as in you can walk about an entire space ship... and choose what you do.. compared to say an "escape the room" scene where you are all in a single room.
A good example of this is space quest 1. You have the escape the space ship, then a totally separate section of "get to the town" then a totally separate section "get off the planet" etc etc. The point is that you can produce these separate sections of your game to a near finished result and fell that you are making progress rather than spending months working on a project and having nothing you can in fact show anyone but a lot of cool backgrounds.
To your other questions as people said, yes wme is perfect for all this. The one thing is programming the game. I think people may have been a little harsh here. WME scripting is very friendly to new programmers. You will need to learn some basic stuff, but as long as you do not overly complicate your game you can produce a decent hobby project with little more than the information in the tutorials. Though if you want to do some fancy stuff (witch is always more interesting to play) you may need to get deeper into coding.
So my advise is
- Use WME
- Keep it simple
- Keep it short
- Design the game as separate "modules"