2D cross-platform game engine for Android and iOS?
V-Play (v-play.net) is a cross-platform game engine based on Qt/QML with many useful V-Play QML game components for handling multiple display resolutions & aspect ratios, animations, particles, physics, multi-touch, gestures, path finding and more. API reference The engine core is written in native C++, combined with the custom renderer, the games reach a solid performance of 60fps across all devices.
V-Play also comes with ready-to-use game templates for the most successful game genres like tower defense, platform games or puzzle games.
If you are curious about games made with V-Play, here is a quick selection of them:
- Squaby: a tower defense game
- Chicken Outbreak: a platformer like Doodle Jump
- Blockoban: puzzle game
- Crazy Elephant: a game similar to Angry Birds
- Snowball Mania: multiplayer action game
- Blitzkopf: brain game
(Disclaimer: I'm one of the guys behind V-Play)
I've worked with Marmalade and I found it satisfying. Although it's not free and the developer community is also not large enough, but still you can handle most of the task using it's tutorials. (I'll write my tutorials once I got some times too).IwGame is a good engine, developed by one of the Marmalade user. It's good for a basic game, but if you are looking for some serious advanced gaming stuff, you can also use Cocos2D-x with Marmalade. I've never used Cocos2D-x, but there's an Extension on Marmalade's Github.
Another good thing about Marmalade is it's EDK (Extension Development Kit), which lets you make an extension for whatever functionality you need which is available in native code, but not in Marmalade. I've used it to develop my own Customized Admob extension and a Facebook extension too.
Edit:
Marmalade now has it's own RAD(Rapid Application Development) tool just for 2D development, named as Marmalade Quick. Although the coding will be in Lua not in C++, but since it's built on top of C++ Marmalade, you can easily include a C++ library, and all other EDK extensions. Also the Cocos-2Dx and Box2D extensions are preincluded in the Quick. They recently launched it's Release version (It was in beta for 3-4 months). I think we you're really looking for only 2D development, you should give it a try.
Update:
Unity3D recently launched support for 2D games, which seems better than any other 2D game engine, due to it's GUI and Editor. Physics, sprite etc support is inbuilt. You can have a look on it.
Update 2
Marmalade is going to discontinue their SDK in favor of their in-house game production soon. So it won't be a wise decision to rely on that.
You mention Haxe/NME but you seem to instinctively dislike it. However, my experience with it has been very positive. Sure, the API is a reimplementation of the Flash API, but you're not limited to targeting Flash, you can also compile to HTML5 or native Windows, Mac, iOS and Android apps. Haxe is a pleasant, modern language similar to Java or C#.
If you're interested, I've written a bit about my experience using Haxe/NME: link
LibGDX is one of the best engines I've ever used, works on almost all platforms, and performs twice as fast as cocos2d-x in most tests I've done. You can use any JVM language you like. Here's a 13 part tutorial in Java, and here's a bunch using jruby. There's a good skeletal animation tool that works with it here, and it has baked in support for tiled TMX maps as well. The ui framework is awesome, and it has a scene graph and actor style API similar to cocos2d scenes, sprites and actions. The community is awesome, updates are frequent, and the documentation is good. Don't let the java part scare you, it's fast, and you can use jruby or scala or whatever you like. I highly recommend it for 2d or 3d work, it supports both.