Hi........,
Say that I have an idea for a simple game or a game mechanic that I want to try out, what are the best tools for quickly creating something playable that I can experiment with to try out the idea? The platform does not necessarily have to be easy to learn, that is not the issue, but once learned it has to be quick to use.

I would check out BlitzMax. Yes, it's based on BASIC, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's not powerful — it's essentially a cross-platform wrapper around C++. It builds upon OpenGL/DirectX and let's you do a lot very quickly. i *highly* recommend it for programming and getting visual concepts out there quickly.

Blitzmax is amazing, another choice is XNA which is also good. A faster way, Game Studio maybe.

yes microsoft xna..

(Pygame is worth a try.. using a high-level programming language like Python to structure the game.)

If you want to try your hand at 2D game, you can use http://love2d.org/ . It's basically a lua game engine, which allows you to write games using lua scripts.

If you are fimiliar with C++ SFML ( http://www.sfml-dev.org/ ) provide a very good framework for games. It not a game engine, but has a lot of the basics required to write your own game, mainly resource loading (image, audio), video (opengl), input etc.

Hi,

Check NeoAxis http://www.neoaxisgroup.com/ but it may not be free.

thanks for the links.. i love 2D games.

If you are using Mac OS X 10.5, you can develop games for the iPhone. To deploy them, you'll need to pay a fee of $99.99 (I think), but you can make quite a profit for just a $.99 app. You will need to learn Objective-C, and/or Objective-C++, but they are extremely similar to C and C++. Apple claims you need to have and intel computer to install the iPhone SDK, but I have taken a few steps to make it work with my ppc mac.