I've been developing applications and tools for many years, and also for realtime 3d ( ogre3d ).
At times I really want to develop casual arcade type games, but often the amount of work to get started is often too much so it demotivates me.
This weekend I was looking around for open source tile-based engines, and I came across a cross-platform engine named LÖVE.
https://www.love2d.org
It's a framework to make 2D games with, and the best part is that it uses LUA, which is something I've been using for many years in 3dsmax maxscript language.
This makes development easy and fast. You can prototype games within hours instead of days.
It was a bit confusing at first to understand how it worked, but reading the wiki tells you all that:
https://www.love2d.org/wiki/Getting_StartedBasically what you do is to create a folder with a file named 'main.lua' then put the example code it it;
function love.draw() love.graphics.print("Hello World", 400, 300)end
then run the love executable with the folder as parameter.
"C:\Program Files (x86)\LOVE\love.exe" "C:\Development\yourgamefolder\"
When I looked into the tilebased games I came across this site which has free art to use for tilebased games
http://opengameart.org/
And as a editor I use:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tiled/?source=dlp
you can export your maps and load them in LÖVE with this library:
https://github.com/Kadoba/Advanced-Tiled-Loader
There are example code to load maps exported with the editor here:
https://github.com/Kadoba/Advanced-Tiled-Loader-Examples
So the easiest way to get started is to download Love engine, download the loader with examples.
Then edit the example levels in Tiled editor, since the example already loads the map and has a character that can move around etc.
