I’ve been spending the afternoon with SFML or Simple and Fast Multimedia Library

It’s a 2D Graphics API for C++ and It’s pretty minimalist, but comes with just the right amount of features for me to build a game framework with. It has almost all of my requirements for a good 2D library including; events (and polling), scaling, rotation, hardware accelerated blending, text rendering, cameras (to zoom and pan the entire scene) and even pixel shaders -Which I probably won’t use for compatibility with older hardware.

Aparently the Mac port is a little behind at the moment, but should hopefully be ready soon.

So far I’ve got some sprites on the screen with some rotation, blending and scaling going on. I’m going to start building the GUI framework soon, incorporating some of the ideas I learnt during the development of Caverns of Underkeep - I’m also going to download and play some more “casual” games, as they often have quite interesting and featureful GUIs.