[joeld42]

C/C++ (or possibly C# if you count Unity) is still the only choice for "real" game dev.

But Haxe (http://haxe.org/) has some great momentum these days, and with a bit of cleverness can target native and web at the same time. Checkout out http://snowkit.org/ and http://haxor.xyz/ for some examples.

It might also line up nicely with your javascript background.

Dart + StageXL (http://www.stagexl.org/) also looks like an appealing choice, especially if you're coming from the JS world. It lacks an easy way to build a native target, though.

But pretty much any language out there has bindings for input, graphics and sound, so if you're more interested in just learning a new language, use whatever you want.

[Profan]

I'd second Haxe, there's a lot of nice things going on in that space, and the language itself[0] has a lot of nice [1] features too, things like algebraic data types and static typing make me slightly less queasy with the idea of writing a game which also deploys to the web (and somewhere else for that matter once you realise you want a native app). (writing a game in it myself right now too)

You're probably going to be going through some more untested ground (compared to working in straight JS if you're going for web), but I quite like working in Haxe personally, and the #haxe irc channel at freenode is very helpful :)

I think it's weird to say process doesn't matter, it definitely does, the fact that (some parts of) the gamedev world sticks almost entirely to "tested" technologies is more a sign of it's conservativeness than anything else. (okay, it's not just that (cue endless memory and performance arguments), but in large part, it really is!, okay and sure friction may be slightly less in something which is more well used, but that's not an excuse to not go for the interesting alternatives!)

So for the OP, if you want to learn an interesting, but sort of fringe language, take a look at haxe (people like: http://grapefrukt.com/) use it for game dev for example!

[0] http://haxe.org/manual/lf-pattern-matching-guards.html [1] http://haxe.org/documentation/introduction/language-features...

[thethinker1032]

I third Haxe. From what I've read and done in it, it is a extremely nice language to work within. I just wish it had a bit more tutorials for people to learn from.