Here's a shorter answer: Have money or want to make money? Buy Unity 3D. No money, non-commercial: Free Unity 3D. Refuse to use anything closed source? Then

Here's a shorter answer: Have money or want to make money? Buy Unity 3D. No money, non-commercial: Free Unity 3D. Refuse to use anything closed source? Then go open source (and in that realm there are too many choices for me to recommend one.) Unity 3D is a really good product, and it bridges the gap of being easy to get started with while simultaneously capable of professional AA title work. Your art will still be a lot of work, but Unity has the engine side of things covered . The programming paradigms are perfect for game development too. Really worth checking out. (I'm assuming you're building stand alone executables or mobile games, Unity is usable in the browser with the Unity plugin, which a surprisingly large number of people have installed.)