Flash/Actionscript is easy to learn and good for quick prototyping. However, watch out for online tutorials for Actionscript, as the 3 versions vary quite a bit.

Java's nice and all but BEWARE:

The Passive Rendering Scheme that's used for swing and AWT applications is SSSLLLOOOWWW. There is a solution to that: do the rendering actively by creating your own buffer to blit to and creating and Initializing the graphics objects yourself. Sadly from what I've found out through endless hours of Googling about the subject of Java active rendering, there isn't much on the web about the subject. It gets even worse when you try to learn about full-screen exclusive mode.

I have happily switched to C# and XNA and so far, I absolutely love it. C# is Microsoft's adaption on Java to which they have added Operator Overloading and structs to. Not to mention many other wonderfull things like properties and indexers. But don't let me confuse you.

What I'm saying is that Java would be fine for making a 2D game with. There's just not as many people making games(and therefore making tutorials and articles online) with Java2D as there are people producing games with XNA.

Quote:Original post by jdub
Java's nice and all but BEWARE:

The Passive Rendering Scheme that's used for swing and AWT applications is SSSLLLOOOWWW. There is a solution to that: do the rendering actively by creating your own buffer to blit to and creating and Initializing the graphics objects yourself. Sadly from what I've found out through endless hours of Googling about the subject of Java active rendering, there isn't much on the web about the subject. It gets even worse when you try to learn about full-screen exclusive mode.

I have happily switched to C# and XNA and so far, I absolutely love it. C# is Microsoft's adaption on Java to which they have added Operator Overloading and structs to. Not to mention many other wonderfull things like properties and indexers. But don't let me confuse you.

What I'm saying is that Java would be fine for making a 2D game with. There's just not as many people making games(and therefore making tutorials and articles online) with Java2D as there are people producing games with XNA.

For Java and 2D games i would actually recomend going with LWJGL instead since its alot easier(personal opinion) to get good performance that way. (LWJGL is a Java wrapper for OpenGL, OpenAL, DevIL and FMOD). (Java2D can use OpenGL for hardware acceleration if you use -Dsun.java2d.opengl=True when starting the application though)