I know quite a lot about web development. I made some games in Flash (Actionscript 3.0) and web applications in PhP (object oriented), javascript, Ajax etc…

I always wanted to learn to use a game engine, preferably free without limitations. One thing that really put me off is that it’s seems to be really hard to find one with up to date tutorials that take you by the hand and end up with a small game. Sometimes I even had a hard time to install/compile them in the first place.

The shift is really hard for me. Flash is like a closed system, I don’t have to compile it first, I can do many things without requiring extern libraries or tools. It has support for input, sound, and an eventhandler, scene manager, built in tools for animations… It’s really an “all in one” tool that allows you to make fast progress. And there are quite a few tutorials that start with the absolute basics and end with a complete, small game.

Many, even often suggested, game engines seem to be quite different. Or they are just a graphic library. I guess that’s the price for more complexity and performance, but It’s confusing and frustrating for me. Can you suggest me a versatile Engine that has an up-to-date documentation and/or tutorials that will cover more than how to use some features of that engine?

Note: I'm using Windows

If you love flash, maybe look at OpenFL?

That said, most of the biggies, like Unity and Unreal have pretty decent tutorial support, and forums and StackOverflow-esque question/answer sites. These big ones also have random people who post tutorials of their own. I followed a tower defense tutorial to get me started on Unity.

Are you looking to move to 3d or stay 2d? If the latter, you may want to look into something like GameMaker or Coco2d or one of the various HTML5 game engines.

When I think of good documentation, I think of commented and explained code, with complete examples, detailing simple as well as asoric aspects of the enginein such a way so as to pick up and program. That being said, I'm not sure there is such a thing. Just a lot of game engines with documentation ranging from decent to abysmal. Some better examples are Unity, Panda3d, and Irrlicht.

Blender, it has a pretty decent game engine to work with. It's kept up to date, there are a lot of tutorials on the web for it, and it's quite to create game or even normal game for that matter in it. Hopefully I helped .

Yeah, have fun with that one.

Torque 3d deserves a mention...

http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d

Apparently it is now "free" per MIT license. I haven't used it in a long time...not sure about how sparse or rich the documentation is now. But its worth a look.

I use Haaf's Game Engine (HGE) http://hge.relishgames.com/

Its a hardware accelerated 2d engine.

There are tutorials and docummentation on site as well as entire source code available on their website even tho the last version is from 2008 it is completely free even for commercial use (except the included BASS sound library, which is free only for noncommercial use)