Hello,
I've been programming for nearly 25 years now, and I'd like to get back to what I was doing 20 years ago: games.
But of course, a lot of things have changed, and I've myself changed. I don't have the patience I had back then, I'm not ready to asm-code every sprite blitter anymore, but well, it's what game engines & graphic cards are for today anyway.
So I wanna do 2D games, not that I don't like 3D, but I can still do pixel graphics, not 3D models.
I come from Pascal, and while I think Pascal is the best language, I understand it's nearly dead by now - leaving the horrible Delphi & kinda bad FreePascal as the only compilers. So I'll have to learn a new (possibly scripting) language as well, and I guess it will always look more or less like C.
I've already tried Unity, but.. it didn't feel at all like how I was making games 20 years ago. To start with, I like to think in "game ticks", not "events". I kinda understand why an engine moves away from that, afterall you can't always force the graphic card to the refresh rate of your game's clock like you could under DOS. But.. I'd still prefer a game loop-based system, assuming there are still engines that work like this(?)
I've browsed game engines, picked some that felt like they were matching, so if anyone has any tip for me, thanks!
I'd like to make a tile-based puzzler in the vein of Apogee's Paganitzu. Even though the graphics will be pixellated, I'd probably use the engine in full res, so that I can smoothly move sprites around, not snap them to pixels in a small, scaled up buffer.
Since I'm moving away from the horrible Delphi, portablity is a big plus, thus I've picked those that appear to feature portability, at least to Android.
http://overlap2d.com
http://ethanonengine.com
Is any of those the best for me? Or any other?