I would like to implement some simple games and demos.
As a former (career) game developer, you would think this would be easy, but I have been out of the industry for more than a decade, and have been overwhelmed by just how many APIs, IDEs, languages and general resources are available now.
There are a lot of good engines so I guess I can’t go wrong, but I would be interested to hear some opinions regardless.
I list my own requirements below, but I’m fine with this thread being general recommendations for game engines.
I’m most comfortable with C# and Java. I’m not looking for a “no coding required” platform
I will be focusing on 2D / 2.5D games
I have no plan to publish anything; it’s just for trying out concepts. PC-only is fine.
Value simplicity over power. I recently made a playable demo using Unity, but a larger proportion of my time was spent learning the IDE than I would have liked.
You’ll probably just have to give it more time here, though you will likely get more expertise on another forum. Lots of gamers here, not so many game developers.
I’ve never been much of a game developer myself past some modding and one small indie xbox game a decade ago, but I found the XNA framework from Microsoft easy enough to work with in C# for some small projects. Looks like they’ve discontinued development for that specific framework in recent years, but it’s still available, or there are open source clones of it, or you could browse through their newer GameStack offerings.
Since you have some experience with Unity, maybe there are more advanced game creation engines built on top of it? But like you said, there are a million choices out there these days. Even things like Roblox where you basically create games within a game-like interface. It really depends on what you’re looking to do.
I’m a hobbyist at best, and even then I tend to focus on the art and design side of things but I can prototype concepts in Godot in an hour or two. And my ability to code is only a step or two above my ability to breathe.