Yes, I'm aware of the legal stuff to do with releasing mobile games, but that's not a concern right now. I just want to get my hands dirty on mobile game development.

Hello! I've been trying to figure out what's right for me in the Mobile Game Development world, and here are my results so far:

LibGDX - Got to the point where nothing made sense

Citrus Engine - I can't find a way to learn ActionScript and code it on a Mac for free

CoronaSDK - Paid engine for In-App purchases

Cocos2d - Too hard to use

Standard Android SDK - Said to be really slow and hard to use

Kivy - Can't seem to find a good way of learning it

ImpactJS - Too complicated and $99

MonoGame - Need Xamarian studio or whatever it's called, costs around $400

PyGame - Only a subset for Android

LÖVE-Androd - Still in development and isn't nearly ready for game development

As you can see I've been trying this for a long time. I do NOT intend to use game makers, because they are wrong. You should have to code your game and not have these "Easy Options".

After a lot of searching, I've found the Emo-Framework. It uses Squirrel, which seems easy to pick up. It works on iOS and Android, and is designed for games. I'd love to use Python, but I can't find a Mobile Game Engine in Python(Other than PyGame, which only has an Android subset). Anyhow, I'd like to use Emo.

Have you got any suggestions for a mobile game engine, other then ones that use C++, Objective C or C and ones that are NOT game makers. I don't understand why people don't want to do 100% of the code anymore. It saddens me :|

Anyway, if you've used the Emo engine, would you recommend it? What would you recommend over it and why(as long as the engine meets the criteria above)?

Thanks! Any replies are appreciated!

I do NOT intend to use game makers, because they are wrong. You should have to code your game and not have these "Easy Options".

If you are determined to avoid "easy options" on vague emotional notions of them being wrong, then you're going to have a bad time. Game development is hard and time consuming. My gut tells me that unless a developer is willing to cut a corner now and then, or go the easy route, she'll never see a project through to completion. Besides, how easy is too easy? Where's the line drawn? Personally, I don't think you're a real programmer unless you do it all in assembly. All these "programmers" using C or C++ to code are amateurs. I'm talking to you, John Carmack.

More seriously, I would encourage you to not to immediately discredit "easy options," because no matter how much easier a game maker is to use over straight-up coding, game development is still hard.

I can't speak to all of the options you've listed above, but I know something about a few of them:

Android SDK - It's only "hard to use" in that it is not a framework designed for game development. It provides access to the hardware and operating system services. Java code running against the SDK will be slower than well written C or C++ code, sometimes significantly. Carefully written Java can be fast on Dalvik (Android's Java VM), but it's not easy to do right. Just like in C or C++ you need to be very aware of how you're allocating memory in Java otherwise you'll have to deal with the garbage collector causing stutters in your framerate. I think this is why many iOS usually feels smoother than Android, but that's just a gut feeling. I have no evidence and don't have the inclination to look for some.

Kivy - Kivy is built on python and I think for anything beyond a simple game you will hit the performance wall.

MonoGame - You do not need to buy Xamarin studio to use MonoGame. MonoGame is free of cost to use. People are having success with MonoGame, but keep in mind you will have some of the same performance issues as you would if using the Android SDK. Mono runs on a virtual machine with a generational garbage collector. If you're not nice to it, it will bite you.

PyGame - Love pygame on the desktop, but, again, I think it would be too slow for anything but simple games. Also not very polished.

Pruning your post a little bit:

Hello! I've been trying to figure out what's right for me in the Mobile Game Development world, and here are my results so far:

LibGDX - Got to the point where nothing made sense

Cocos2d - Too hard to use

Standard Android SDK - Said to be really slow and hard to use

Kivy - Can't seem to find a good way of learning it

Have you got any suggestions for a mobile game engine, other then ones that use C++, Objective C or C and ones that are NOT game makers. I don't understand why people don't want to do 100% of the code anymore. It saddens me :|

Anyway, if you've used the Emo engine, would you recommend it? What would you recommend over it and why(as long as the engine meets the criteria above)?

Thanks! Any replies are appreciated!

You are learning many things right now.

* Mindset of programming

* New programming language

* Mobile device programming

* Game programming

* Graphics programming

If GDX and Cocos2d are both hard for you, then you simply are not ready to add mobile devices to your skill set right now.

Start out by learning how to develop programs on the PC. Wait until you have mastered that before you start cross-compiling and remote debugging on mobile devices.

After you are comfortable with programming on the PC you will find the transition to mobile development to be less difficult.

Dude, you realize that pygame's core is written on c++ right? Same is truth for most part of kivy (some of its classes are still use python).
I hardly see how its performance can be a problem on the logic of the game (it will be an incredible small performance lost if you consider the cost of rendering), and even if it is, use cython to optimize your code and you reach the C speed.
I recomend reading this: http://docs.cython.org/src/quickstart/cythonize.html

Yes.

Have you written anything using pygame? Pygame is not a game engine where most of the work is coded in high performance C code. There is no "render my scene and call these functions when stuff happens." Pygame does not have a "render_mesh" function. There is no "pathfind_astar" function there for you. There isn't even a "render my 2D scrolling tile map" function. You'll be coding these tight loops in python, and they will be slow because python is slow. On top of that, most of your calls to pygame APIs will need to cross the python to native ABI bridge. Marshaling these calls from python is slow, slow, slow. Each primitive you draw, each OpenGL call, every call to blit a surface will incur significant overhead. Not to mention many mobile devices have as high and in some cases higher screen resolutions than a typical desktop, which introduces even more overhead because you will probably be doing more blitting and drawing of primitives. AND further again, using high resolution images and textures, meaning more memory pressure, meaning ultimately to even more GC stutter.

So, dude. I know all about pygame. I use it. I love it. It's not for anything other than the
simplest of mobile games.

LibGDX - Got to the point where nothing made sense

Then you're halfway there, now you just have to get to the point where everything makes sense again.

And now I'm there. It's making sense now! Thanks for the nice reply :) LibGDX is actually a lot easier now. I just started the tutorial I was following from the start, and it was a lot easier. I started to fill in some of the stuff(like the tween engine) before the guy in the tutorial talked about it :) Cocos2d has always been hard. It uses a thing called "nodes". I can't find a good explanation of them. I think a node is basically like a child of something, I think. But I'm not sure. :|