I have been coding on and off for over ten years and thought that programming simple games could expand my interests and experience. By picking up game programming I am hoping to spark my creativity.

Ideally I want to steer towards implementation of procedurally generated terrain, Voxel landscapes and exploration.

AI, pathing, structures, NPC development, etc.

I was thinking of using Java but if there are better options I'd be interested in knowing. So I'm a complete noob. What currently is popular in regards to dev environments, libraries, or instructional youtube videos?

Hi! since you've been coding on and off for over ten years, I assume that you can adapt fairly easy on any programming language. I recommend learning C++ and OOP first. After that, use an existing game engine like OGRE3D or Cocos2d-x and make a very small game like PONG or ARKANOID or if you can make TETRIS, it's better. After creating your first game, try making another one or two. By the time you finish your 3rd game, you will have a basic idea of how a video game works(flow, handling inputs, collision detection, etc.)

You can now:

-continue to make games using the same game engine

-use another game engine, learn it, make games from it

-study the internals of a certain game engine and try to make your own

Regarding AI, Path-finding, etc., you will need to study their respective algorithms. So basically, you still need to learn the basics of game development before you implement these topics; unless of course you just want to learn, i.e. A* algorithm for path-finding, you can just read stuffs about it.

I was thinking of using Java but if there are better options I'd be interested in knowing. So I'm a complete noob. What currently is popular in regards to dev environments, libraries, or instructional youtube videos?

Unity3D is very popular these days and I would recommend it because it lets you to concentrate on the creative side instead of the low level technical details of a game engine.

You can use C# for scripting, it is very similar to Java. I made the transition from Java to C# couple of years back and the languages are so similar you can almost directly compile Java code in C#.