Game development platform recommendations?

Pixel's roommate was a coder. He wanted to make a computer game, so his roommate taught him a programming language. He first started with displaying a character, then gradually built it up into cave story!

no wai is it done in game maker 

Let's not forget, however, that Pixel had other games before Cave Story. At the very least, there is an IkaChan reference in the IronHead boss.

Judging from the fact that Iji was created in Game Maker, Spelunky was also created in Game Maker, and more other noteworthy games were created in Game maker, I would suggest...


...Game Maker! You guessed it!

I never said that cave story was made in GM. It wasn't made in GM.

Anyway let's not stray too much off the topic, assuming of course there's anything else useful to add.

Can I recommend LOVE?
www.love2d.org
It's written in C++ but uses Lua (a very efficient yet easy to use/learn scripting language)
It's also cross-platform (windows/linux/mac)
I've used it a few times myself, it's got a great community over there and is constantly being improved.