What is the best engine for my first serious 2d game? [closed]

Question

What game engine/graphics engine should I use for my first indie game? I'd like to add that this is not my first game, I've previously used Allegro for 2d development (pong, chess and stuff).

I am open to suggestions for other engines. I was thinking about a game like "The legend of Zelda" for the NES (just to give you an idea what I was planning).

I've heard of SDL, I've used Allegro, my friends use OpenGL, what is the best for starting? (SDL seemed a bit hard, judging from their Wiki, a lot of stuff I haven't used before).

BTW, the language is C++.

Answer 1

First of all, what you're looking for isn't really an engine. You're looking for a graphics API or a graphics API Wrapper to do your drawing.

I can recommend SFML. It's a C++ library that manages most of the basic things that everyone needs for you.

It features a relatively powerful graphics part which wraps around OpenGL, but also includes basic support for window-management, input (keyboard, mouse, joystick/gamepad), audio (playing sounds and music) and networking.

Since it's C++ and entirely object-oriented, it will be very simple to understand. For example, loading an image and displaying it more or less looks as simple as this (in SFML2.0):

sf::Texture texture.
texture.LoadFromFile("blabla/test/supermario.png");

sf::Sprite sprite;
sprite.SetTexture(texture);

//somewhere else
window.Draw(sprite /*, myAwesomeShader Optional shader argument */);

Apart from the superior code-design, it's also a lot faster than the current version of SDL and has more features (if you use the basic SDL libs).

I can really recommend it if you're using C++.

Also, if you're going to pick SFML, start with SFML2 instead of 1.6. It isn't officially released yet, but it is going to be very soon and not a lot will change in the API until then. The latest SVN snapshots of SFML are always available on the download page.