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.