Looking for isometric game engine

[Martyr]

Always wanted to make an isometric game. Making the assets isn't difficult, but my coding skills are only rudimentary. I'm looking for a relatively artist-friendly engine that's free, but those don't exist (or at least I couldn't find them). Might consider making a mod for a commercial game engine instead, but I'm aiming for a pretty particular graphical style, and modding a commercial game would limit the amount of people who would be able to play it. Could also use Game Maker, have some experience with that, but building 2.5D games in that is completely new for me. Any tips?

[blumunkee]

Not sure what you mean by artist friendly, but LOVE has a simple and straightforward API and it uses Lua, which is a nice little scripting language. There are engines out there that require minimal to no coding effort, but I'm not sure how flexible they are.

[RedKnight91]

Depends on the platform : ? If you're talking 'bout PC, I dunno, as for iPhone, there's cocos2D

[snow1wolf]

Honestly, you would be best off finding a programmer to work with even the most user friendly and easy to use engines in existence are inevitably going to be missing certain features you want in your game.  Since for the most part engines are starting places not finished be all products in of themselves.  Otherwise you would be forced to constrain yourself to the features set available to the engine and
nothing else.

I do admit shamelessly that I am prowling for an artist to work on a project of my own.  I am messing around with the Torque engine and have it setup with an isometric and semi orthographic view point.  Innately though the world is still 3D.  

Here is a quick screen shot of a test map with some ripped stand in sprites from disgaea i was using to test out my code for the animation.



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Now of course I am wanting to work on a commercial game and this pseudo 3D stuff may or may not be your thing, and we might end up having wildly different ideas on graphical style (not that I am showing in that screen) but you never know these things until you have a look at least.  Oh and in case anyone was curious I am using the much older Torque game engine for that screen shot.  I am currently working on a similar setup for T3D