Being a total noob when it comes to using blockchain for development, I would like to know if Cardano can be used, at the time being, to mint and trade NFTs for gaming purposes and if this could be fairly easy to achieved on an engine like unity or unreal.
Or should I stick to something that is more directed towards that purpose, like Enjin?
Cardano adrestia links to several different options for interacting with Cardano from 3rd party applications & languages. cardano-wallet provides a REST API to manage a wallet, and can send/manage tokens, but does not appear to have minting functionality just yet.
AFAIK, the only way to mint tokens at the moment (if you don't want to use Haskell SDK) is by using cardano-cli as documented here. Creating tokens dynamically would then require writing a layer on top of the CLI, since several intermediate steps are involved in transaction building.
For the client-side of your game, you may want to consider 3rd party APIs like blockfrost.io for fetching user's NFT data, or provide it from your own server along with regular game data.
Not currently.
NFTs are essentially smart contracts implementing auctions for assets embedded in the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS). So, you need a blockchain that supports smart contracts.
Ethereum supports these via the Solidity VM and language, but Cardano's smart contract VM and language (Plutus) is forthcoming in the Goguen release of the Cardano blockchain.
You can start getting familiar with the Plutus language and the smart contract platform via the Cardano Plutus Pioneer Program lectures (being released actively over the next few weeks). The first one is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEn6jUo-0vU .
Apparently NFTs are implemented as native tokens on the Cardano blockchain (which don't require writing a smart contract). So, yes. You can make an NFT (platform) on top of the Cardano blockchain.
