For 2d gamedev, I recommend raylib, GMS2, or Godot If I had to pick one, I'd say go with raylib. Free, open source, lightweight, portable, friendly and helpful

For 2d gamedev, I recommend raylib, GMS2, or Godot If I had to pick one, I'd say go with raylib. Free, open source, lightweight, portable, friendly and helpful Discord community, super helpful and friendly and engaged lead dev, bindings to tons of languages, builds for many platforms, straightforward high-level API that is sufficiently documented by a simple cheatsheet, a great set of related gamedev tools taht are also developed and maintained by the same lead dev, and it's just a (C99) library, not an inverted-control framework. So you just have a while loop in main() that checks for whether the window should be closed and lets you do whatever updates in whatever order you want. If you ultimately develop commercial indie aspirations, you may want to move to GMS2 as it makes it easier to do things like publish to consoles and integrate Steam APIs. Tons of commercial indie hit have been made and continue to be made with GMS2. Stay away from Unity....2d is a second-class citizen in Unity.