Hello Pros,
What is the quickest Language for a newbie to create 2D games for Windows-98 or Windows-2000 platform; C++, Java or C# ?

How long should it take using C++ ?
I have minimal experience in C++ (upto but not including Classes).
I have an old Visual C++ (version 4.0) development set.

Thanks
KoolD

You have to remember that Java and C# both have their basics mounted in the world of C++. I find that Java might be more beginner friendly but C++ will be the most useful to you in the future since many games and apps are built either directly using C++ or using languages which are based on C++ indirectly.

Since DIC supports all three, any language you chose would be easy!

I would use either c++ due to the openGL or java.

Java has an extensive set of image and graphics manipulation functions built-in, which makes it quite straightforward what to use (just quite, because there are many extensions that shade the picture a bit). Anyway, very good documentation and tutorials are available, so I would recommend it.
For C++ there are many libraries, so you can probably find one that suits your needs, however documentation quality is very fluctuating.
However if portability and platform independence is a goal, Java it is easier to implement in Java - not impossible with C++ either, but a little bit more work.
C# is an interesting option, but I think it's somewhere inbetween, but I've never used it for such purposes, so I can't talk about my experiences here.

Finally, you've asked about 2D, but it can still indicate that you need hardware acceleration to look nice. OpenGL is clearly a way to go for platform agnostic things, and it can be used in any of the languages mentioned above. DirectX (afaik) is not available in Java, and if it would be it wouldn't make any sense, because it would run on windows only. It is a bit harder maybe to learn, and it wouldn't have much advantage in 2D anyway.
For sounds and music OpenAL is also a platform independent solution, and it is available for each of these languages.

I doubt you will get around classes or any object oriented concepts for that matter, if you want to design an entire game in an object oriented language like c#.

If you are serious about this and you start writing code without knowing these concepts you will find a few weeks down the road that you will have to re-do everything.
It will be so much easier to create a basic entity/monster class and then have let's say a skeleton or spider class inherit the properties and methods from that base class.

Otherwise you'll have to re-teach every single entity in your game how to move and so forth.

This post has been edited by Daiken: 23 Sep, 2007 - 02:19 AM