Trying to decide on what to use to make games for my club again. We have a wider variety of members than I thought we would. Some people want to use C++, some want to use ruby with rpg maker, others want to use html 5, some want to use game maker or other things.

So I'm trying to weigh the pros and cons but that would mean individually looking up what people have to say about all these various choices. So I thought I'd come here to help me decide what we should use to get started.

Our choices are

C++ with SFML

Java

HTML 5

GameMaker

RPG Maker

Unity

What I'm really wondering is how easy is GameMaker and RPG Maker to use? Also RPG Maker has many different versions. What are the differences in versions and what are the pros and cons of each? Also, how difficult is making a 2D game in Unity?

Thanks for any help, it's really appreciated.

As you say you like Ruby, you can also use it together with rbSFML bindings to SFML. I tried it recently and had to compile both myself from the git versions, for having it compatible with the DevKit for Ruby 1.9.3, but its not that difficult to get it working when you know where to look. I just have to start making something more useful now than a simple test program.

http://rubyinstaller.org/

http://sfml-dev.org/tutorials/2.1/compile-with-cmake.php

https://github.com/Groogy/rbSFML

Well, I mentioned it because both SFML and Ruby are in their list already, the part inside SFML is not so slow because its in C++ (but its easier because they dont have to directly use it), and they list other slow things like HTML already. They probably want to make something small where it doesnt matter and not a AAA game, when they list RPG maker as a choice where they would also use Ruby.

Though if they want to invest more time into learning C++ to make it run faster thats also possible.

I should point out that even if you go with something like Game Maker or RPG Maker that neither of them completely remove the concept of coding. They both provide what is basically a game engine tooled to one genre or set of game genres that you can customize with scripting.

In fact the scripting is there really regardless of what you do they just wrap it up in GUI elements. Making game maker objects move and interact intelligently is rather time consuming and uses a lot of the same logic that just writing a script would, RPG maker is the same way except for a lot of things you HAVE to edit the scripts like if you want windows to behave differently or combat to work significantly different, it offers a lot of flexibility but you can end up basically rewriting the gameplay layer. There's negatives too like performance can become a problem in both depending on the scale of game and there are bugs and quirks to work around, unfortunately you won't have much direct support for getting those bugs fixed either.

tl;dr: The workload is going to be big either way and it is actually a much easier prospect if you at least learn a bit of scripting for them. Each thing just has different tradeoffs.