Making a Metroidvania Game - Looking for Engine

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Hello. So I've many several games in the past, mainly in Flash but a view in other work environments, the most complex thing I've done is this: http://ganondox.deviantart.com/art/Serv ... -354987516 I've never actually done a platformer before though, and I tend to have some problems with boundary testing. I've decided not to work in Flash for this project, first because I currently don't have Flash, but secondly because like Servant of Discord it's gonna be sprite based, and Flash sucks for that, that was a source for many of the technical problems in Servant of Discord. So, I'm just looking for a good game engine for this game so I can start working on it. Here is a brief description of the game:

"Metroidvania based around making deals with demons, and you need to make deals with other demons to defeat them as no demon can be defeated with just the power they give you. The game begins with making a deal with Mephistopheles and ends with defeating Satan. Each demon gives a second ability if you eat their heart after defeating him. Each demon has a unique name, location, appearance, time, battle, theme, abilities, and power level. Each ability has a power level, your power level is the sum of all the power levels of your abilities. Each demon must be summoned at their location to make the deal, but if your power level exceeds theirs, they won’t show up (fortunately items don’t count towards it!). A demon will teleport you to it’s arena when it’s time is up and they are next in queue unless another demon is being fought. Some demons can be instantly challenged if at the front of their queue. Satan is always last in queue. The game has four endings depending on if you eat all the demon hearts or not, and then if you eat Satan’s heart. The graphics are vaguely SNES and inspired by Paradise Lost and classic medieval manuscript art. The game has both a health and a stamina meter which is drained by various thing like flying, magic, and swimming.

Basic Plot: You play the scholar Faust, who previously made a deal with Mephistopheles for knowledge about electricity. After being attacked by a group of highwaymen at the crossroads who take all you have and you are left for dead. Mephistopheles comes to collect your soul. However, the intervention of your deceased lover Gretchen prevents him from doing so. So instead he offers to save your life in exchange for overriding Gretchen’s intervention, which you accept. After being revived you tell yourself that this time you’ll find another way to escape, and gameplay starts. "

I have a bunch of other details in the design doc I made for myself, but I want to keep stuff secret. A few other things I need to note is that after I get the main game finished and released I plan on making an expansion to it, and a simple grid based map system won't suffice:

"Note on navigation: At various instances there are doors or halls and other intersections which are entered by pressing “up”, these change which plane the player is in. Doors move into a parallel plane, but directions are reversed as it’s a mirror image. Intersections meanwhile bring the player into a more or less perpendicular plane, typically inverting north and west and south and east. You won’t appear right outside the intersection, but rather slightly to the left or right depending on what direction you walked to go through. This is important for navigating many places like the city, and even R'lyeh, as while it has non-euclidean geometry and varying gravity, it still follows those two rules. Directions in R’lyeh are constant for a subarea, and carry-on between areas, regardless of how geometry didn’t work. "

Finally, for technical requirements I want something that can export both a Windows and Mac build easily. So if anyone has any recommendations for a game engine that would be much appreciated.

I think Game Maker is the thing you're looking for. It's actually been used for a fair number of indie game projects, and it can export to Windows, Mac, and Linux. It used to be kind of a primitive program only capable of making simplistic games, but it's being used for so much more now. There's also Unity, though I don't know as much about it.

If you want, I can help you get in touch with a couple people I know who are involved in indie game development. Just shoot me a PM.

How about pure HTML5 and JS?

Just add a SVG canvas and you can do lots of things (Wont work in IE though). You can even do WebGL in some browsers.

Screw all these high level languages, you should code this game in hand-optimized x86 assembly language. Make it run under MS-DOS on a 66MHz 486 with 8MB of ram, 320x200 256 color VGA Mode X graphics, and Sound Blaster compatible audio with OPL3 FM synthesized music. Hey, it'll give your game cross-platform support right off the bat thanks to DosBox.

Of course, I still think Game Maker is probably your best option, though C++ is supposed to be a good language for game programming as well.

I usually code things from scratch in C instead of using an engine. SDL is a nice high-level library for doing 2D graphics. I made a simple 2D fighting game a few years ago with it, but I lost the code for it.

HTML5 stuff generally runs like crap unless you've got an extremely powerful computer. Javascript is not a high performance language. Native C/C++ code is much better.

To create executables from C/C++ source code, you need to use a compiler such as GCC, which is a program that compiles high level source code into machine code. You can install MinGW on Windows or XCode on Mac to get a version of GCC. I tend to stay away from Visual Studio since the latest versions are incredibly bloated and very confusing to get started with. I use makefiles to build my programs, but this is usually hell for a beginner to learn, since it uses its own rule-based language for running build commands, and then different platforms require different libraries and compiler flags which makes it very complicated. If you want to create GUI programs, you either need to use platform-specific functions, or use a cross-platform library like GTK or Qt. I really think something like boundary testing and collision detection should be implemented from scratch. It's not that hard to implement properly in 2D.

If you're not ready to learn C++, you can try something like QB64, which is a port of QuickBasic to Windows, OS X, and Linux. I made a simple Zelda style game in it when I was younger.

Okay, I took another look at Gamemaker, and I see what the problem is - the professional version has the technical requirements I need, but the free version does not.