Hey all,

So I made a posting about getting into web game dev but have been considering scaling our project back to desktop/app market instead. The game is 2D, similar in art/style to Diner Dash albeit with a more Zelda-like gameplay.

I have been looking at SDL as it's always been the most known / versatile framework that has cross-platform compatibility - how is it nowadays? Is it still "the king" or are there better alternatives I should consider? I also saw on their site they now boast iOS / Android support, how good is it? And what about commercial licensing?

Also, if I wanted to go down the XBLA route, is XNA is my only option as an Indie, correct? I do like C# and am fairly familiar with DX so it would be an easy jump, but would limit me in other areas (desktop protability, tho I know about Mono, and lack of exisitng libraries/APIs when compared to C++).

What about Unity, how viable is it for 2D (sprite) games? I've reading/watching some tutorials and it looks like it would be pretty quick to get into.

Or perhaps there's other, newer frameworks/engines I should have a look at?

Thanks!

Bump?

So looking at the Free Libs list I also saw SMLF which seems to be pretty much what SDL does. Any thoughts on how it compares to SDL and how "mature" it is?

I looked briefly into SDL for Android, but AFAICT this is for SDL 2.0 which is still being worked on, though you can build from the latest source in the repository. There was also an unofficial port for SDL 1.2, but I believe is no longer being worked on. So it's possible - there are games on Google Play - but it doesn't seem to be well supported yet, and seems a bit tricky. If I'm wrong, I'd be happily corrected

I'm using Qt to support Windows/Linux/Android/Symbian - the Android port is an unofficial "alpha", but IMO seems to work easier than the unofficial SDL port, and arguably is already better than using the official Google NDK (e.g., requires command line Linux commands; Qt for Android just works straight from the IDE).

mike4 may be thinking of Qt Game Enabler ( http://projects.deve...m/qtgameenabler ) - although note that even plain Qt provides a cross-platform framework just like SDL (windowing, graphics, sound, images, input, network etc), and supports both its own 2D graphics engine, and OpenGL.

I'm still looking forward to SDL 2 with proper Android support though - and I'd be curious to know if there are any free cross-platform libraries out there with official non-alpha Android support?

Well I just skimmed through the documentation of both. SMFL looks awesome, it's clean, neat and to-the-point. SDL, on the other hand, feels like it's an almost direct Win32 API wrapper, together with ugly window handles and tons of global funcs / macros / consts etc. Plus, unless I am missing something, it does not seem to have much in terms of 2D image manipulation aside from blits; SFML supports full transformation, rotation and scaling of images which is much nicer.

There are some fantastic extensions that make developing 2D games a lot easier. I would recommend having a browse through the asset store to see the various offerings.

It might also be worth considering http://www.haxenme.org which is cross-platform and primarily (only?) for 2D games. It looks really good and I am looking forward to getting my teeth stuck in this myself.