Can you give an example of Java being quite verbose? I'm curious.

The main example I've found is with I/O; to send an object on a socket, I had to get the socket's output stream object, then create a ByteArrayOutputStream, wrap that in a DataOutputStream, serialize the object to the DataOutputStream, convert the ByteArrayOutputStream to a byte array, and dump the byte array into the socket's output stream. Apparently, this is "proper, idiomatic" Java code. It has a lot of nice conceptual separation, but the separation is too fine-grained and leads to allocation of piles and piles of wrapper objects in some cases.

Admittedly, I'm no Java expert, though; someone with more experience might have found a more concise way of doing it.

I guess the thing is that I'm not trying to make "the" game, or the next Call of Duty clone. I'm really trying to make something as simple as a Legend of Zelda homage, 2D and everything. Its something indie studios everywhere seem to be able to crank out all the time. I'm just overwhelmed because I can't tell you how many times I've taken the base rendering shit (like SDL or Allegro), learned the entire library, bugged and debugged to get it to actually draw something, get like a character to walk around, and then ultimately run into a brick wall of tangled classes and game logic caught between making it easy on myself now or easy for myself later and make it OOP as possible. Which is the point when I'm not really sure what to do anymore, nothing I do seems to reflect an actual game concept and I'm just wading through mountains of my own code.

This sounds as if you are too much focused on trying out more and more tools when your problem is something else. I suggest you read some books about software design and about how to structure a game, write down some basic design on paper before you start coding and use the tools you feel most comfortable/skilled with to try your skills on something small.

Just so we're listing cross-platform, mobile-capable engines:

- AppGameKit: http://www.appgamekit.com/ ($)

- Esenthel: http://www.esenthel.com ($)

- Leadwerks 3: http://www.leadwerks.com/ ($)

- GLBasic: http://www.glbasic.com/ ($)

- Irrlicht: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/ (free)

- GamePlay3D: http://gameplay3d.org/ (free)

- Maratis3D: http://www.maratis3d.org/ (free)

Can you give an example of Java being quite verbose? I'm curious.

The main example I've found is with I/O; to send an object on a socket, I had to get the socket's output stream object, then create a ByteArrayOutputStream, wrap that in a DataOutputStream, serialize the object to the DataOutputStream, convert the ByteArrayOutputStream to a byte array, and dump the byte array into the socket's output stream. Apparently, this is "proper, idiomatic" Java code. It has a lot of nice conceptual separation, but the separation is too fine-grained and leads to allocation of piles and piles of wrapper objects in some cases.

Admittedly, I'm no Java expert, though; someone with more experience might have found a more concise way of doing it.

you do have a point there. I use a different way and it takes 3 lines just to set up the file access.