I'm finally getting back into game development and are somewhat torn between using either Allegro or SDL as my higher-level API. I'd given consideration to a number of higher-level engines like Unity or Torque, but many of them are somewhat overkill for what I'm trying to accomplish. I was surprised how convoluted Unity actually is.

I'm actually traditionally an Allegro user, albeit of the 4.x.x branch kind, which was rather different to the stable 5.x.x branch that is in use now. I also had some experience with SDL 1.2.

Given the ubiquity of SDL, I decided to give SDL 2.0 a crack, only to discover that it is nothing short of a fucking mess, mixing up its legacy bitmap blitting support with OpenGL rendering support, so that there really doesn't seem to be much of a benefit over using a 3D engine. It makes 2D graphics unnecessarily complicated and code extremely untidy (in short, rather than providing the tidy blit abstraction functions that previously made SDL so useful, it basically forces the dev to use texture clipping instead and makes you jump through hoops if you simply want to specify coordinates to 'blit' to).

So I've strayed back to using Allegro 5, and found myself able to settle back into the very clean API quite nicely.

There are some issues with Allegro though, especially in relation to acceptance. I'm not under any illusions regarding the fact my game (yes, it will be a 2D platformer) is unlikely to ever hit Steam - not that I'm overly interested in marketing it there - and is it highly unlikely to set the world on fire, Also, I'm not sure about Allegro 5's rendering. I know the unstable Allegro 5.1 branch uses DX9 output, optionally OpenGL (whereupon you run into the same problems as SDL 2.0), and Allegro 4 uses DX7 output, but what does Allegro 5.0 use as standard?

Also, does anyone have any other thoughts on this dilemma?