2d Development Frameworks/suits/engines

[Digivoxel]

@atnas
mind you, i didn't say i don't care about the games. I don't want to play web-based, in browsers. I want an offline available standalone desktop application. 

Stuff about Browsers or something

To add on to what @Atnas said, @Wzl a lot of browser games can be played offline Of course you would need to have that browser.

A good example of this is google chrome. If you have google, turn off your internet. Then on the browser attempt to go to google.com. You should see a dinosaur. Press Space I think twice and you'll be playing a browser game offline

[Kasumi]

SDL: Pretty similar to Allegro which was already posted earlier in this thread. It provides cross-platform ways to do things like draw stuff, resize windows, whatever. For use with C(++). I forgot why I chose it over Allegro, but I've used it to make level editors and tiny client prototypes.

Some of the input stuff's a little weird at first (reading keyboard keys), but I've never found myself frustrated with what it provides. Here's a basic tutorial set.

[ErekT]

Construct2 is really nice. I've tried a few high-level languages and game creation thingies and none of them come close for getting stuff done fast.

Monkey-X is also pretty great. High-level language along the lines of Love.

[Seefour]

I am currently using Unity2D with c#, and tiled (can assemble tilesets into maps, and then import into Unity with Collision)

I have tried Love, Python, C++, and I am currently settling on C#.

Scripting in Unity is very straight forward, and the engine seems solid, and supports every platform...

I am not sure why some of you are saying unity is not good for 2d, please elighten??

[lachrymose]

Unity still has a lot of small issues handling 2D graphics with pixel perfect precision. They, for the most part can be fixed. But it is annoying to have to work around them so strictly to avoid gaps, fragmenting, flickering...etc.

[Seefour]

will keep that in mind moving forward, thanks for the information

[Kurz]

Oh, nice theme!

In my opinion the JavaScript is a best language for casual game-development. Of course it is not so fast as C++ BUT - I repeat myself - it is good for casual games. Also there are lot of game engines written on pure JS.
Plus I would recommended to look at Phaser game engine which is use WebGL (extremely fast thing).

[Gil]

Of course it is not so fast as C++

Eh, give it a couple of years and Javascript is just as fast (compare to Java or C# being "slow" and now being just as fast as the compiled languages). In fact, there's reasons to believe Javascript could actually run faster than C++, if we were to put the Javascript engine in Ring 0 (no need for protecting a safe language). Javascript is about 80% as efficient as C++, Ring 0 would make it 20% faster (which, if you do the math, makes Javascript about 5% faster than C++). This is all very napkin-calculated, but it should be about right.

After all, we live in a world where for every 10 lines of code written, like 8 of those are Javascript, while less than 1 is an unsafe language like C or C++, there's a lot of incentive for companies to get it right.

[Kurz]

Gil, I think that interpreted language can't be faster than compiler one. And before started learn one you have to ask yourself - what for all of this? If you want to make games with open-world and high quality graphics - your way is C++. But if your target is just a small indy game (3D or 2D) - the javascript is right a decision.

It is only my mind and of course there are lot of tricks & little things which will affect the choice.

[API-Beast]

@Gil: C++ has literally zero performance and memory overhead, going below zero is impossible, so you can't go faster than multi-threaded and heavily optimized C++ code. In the best case you have a JIT compiler that compiles the loop into the exact same machine code as the C++ compiler does, but the JIT compiler itself has execution time, e.g. is overhead.

That said, what really matters is the code itself, not the language it is written in. If you execute something 1.000.000 times the overhead of the JIT compiler becomes trivial. Use the language you can write good code in.

According to this test for counting prime numbers in a range is C about 4 times as fast as Javascript (in Node). Which is really really good already, Ruby and PHP are both 6 times slower than Javascript.