How do I make a 2.5D Raiden shooter?

[Madzack]

Hi, I'm thinking of making my own 2.5D shooter in a style of Raiden, Raystorm, or Thunder Force.

Do you know any game engines for beginners that can offer such possibilities, and comes with tutorials?

[Bobtree]

I'm looking forward to TowerClimb, which was made with Construct Classic. The developer explains why here.

Also popular are GameMaker and Flash. Then there are things like PyGame, (Python) and LOVE (Lua), and Processing (Java).

I highly recommend learning Lua if you want to get into programming, as it's a great language and easy to start with, and it's used in a huge number of games because it's easy to embed and very fast and flexible.

[augustuskent]

If you've got some experience in programming Unity is by far the easiest and most flexible engine to work with - and its free!

Even if you don't have much experience, their site also has a heap of tutorials - and their scripting reference/api has a really good search tool + there is an answers-styled database. You can literally google your questions and find answers within minutes.

[djbriandamage]

What exactly makes Raiden 2.5D? The fact that there are areal and ground enemies? I've always considered that to be a 2D game.

[squareking]

What exactly makes Raiden 2.5D? The fact that there are areal and ground enemies? I've always considered that to be a 2D game.

I think he means Raiden's visual style.

[Mohorovicic]

More specifically, parallax scrolling which is so, so good in 2D games.