Seeing as you listed Game Maker there, I would throw in a recommendation for Construct 2 by Scirra: https://scirra.com
They have an excellent 2D HTML5 game engine and a very nice IDE to go with it. The event programming system they use is at least powerful as Game Maker's GML (if not more so) and you can also write your own plugins with JavaScript. Out of three mentioned programs, C2 is definitely my favorite for a couple reasons:
- It's built from ground up with 2D development in mind. Unity in comparison is primarily for 3D development, and while its 2D tools have improved over the years the difference is still really obvious.
- The overall user interface design of C2 is actually from this decade and makes good use of big screens of today. In comparison, you can still very much see the relatively ancient roots in Game Maker's UI when programs were designed with 640x480 screens in mind, not to mention how tons of features added over the years have just been slapped haphazardly into wherever there was room in the UI at the time. Game Maker's drag & drop coding is also just terrible, it's really either GML or go home with it.
- Pricing. You don't have to pay any extra for additional exporters or such with C2. Of course, there is the caveat of having to pay extra attention to mobile performance with C2 games being HTML5-powered on everything it exports to, but on actual computers you can cover the Windows/OSX/Linux combo very nicely.
Now, I mostly do game development as a hobby (which I've been doing on and off ever since I was ~9 years old), but if I wanted to do a commercial 2D indie game project for release on Steam (or similar) today, I'd definitely use Construct 2 for it. If I wanted to do same except for mobile, I'd probably evaluate C2 for it too (simply because I like it so much), but I might end up using something like Unity instead if performance proved to be too much of a headache with C2.
They have an excellent 2D HTML5 game engine and a very nice IDE to go with it. The event programming system they use is at least powerful as Game Maker's GML (if not more so) and you can also write your own plugins with JavaScript. Out of three mentioned programs, C2 is definitely my favorite for a couple reasons:
- It's built from ground up with 2D development in mind. Unity in comparison is primarily for 3D development, and while its 2D tools have improved over the years the difference is still really obvious.
- The overall user interface design of C2 is actually from this decade and makes good use of big screens of today. In comparison, you can still very much see the relatively ancient roots in Game Maker's UI when programs were designed with 640x480 screens in mind, not to mention how tons of features added over the years have just been slapped haphazardly into wherever there was room in the UI at the time. Game Maker's drag & drop coding is also just terrible, it's really either GML or go home with it.
- Pricing. You don't have to pay any extra for additional exporters or such with C2. Of course, there is the caveat of having to pay extra attention to mobile performance with C2 games being HTML5-powered on everything it exports to, but on actual computers you can cover the Windows/OSX/Linux combo very nicely.
Now, I mostly do game development as a hobby (which I've been doing on and off ever since I was ~9 years old), but if I wanted to do a commercial 2D indie game project for release on Steam (or similar) today, I'd definitely use Construct 2 for it. If I wanted to do same except for mobile, I'd probably evaluate C2 for it too (simply because I like it so much), but I might end up using something like Unity instead if performance proved to be too much of a headache with C2.