deving games the /prague/ way

like more or less everyone on /prog/ (make your're are game nikita), I used to have my game dev projects. unlike most people on here, I tried to get over my autism and do it with other people, which turned out to be a big mistake as the project is now stuck in limbo. this makes me sad

to be less sad, I want to try again, this time without other people because fuck them, they ruin everything. and because I like learning new things (new to me that is, they may be actually old things that modern webshit-oriented industry forgot), I'd like you - yes, you - to recommend me a proglang for my next project.

the vidya I have in mind is something relatively simple and arcadey, but think more 'mid-80s sega superscalers' than 'pac-man'. so I'm gonna need something that allows me to move sprites on screen, scale sprites, handle keypresses, play sound and music, and preferably go full-screen (but with a fixed resolution, it's gonna be oldschool). I want minimal dependencies, simple build process (I'll probably ruin it as time goes on but that's just how it is) and as much portability as possible (source code portability is enough).

the language I'm currently considering is Free Pascal because from a bit of research I've done it seems it can do all the shit I want with no external libraries, plus it has an oldschool appeal, just like the kinds of games I'm trying to rip off here - but feel free to recommend something else. a modern language is ok too, as long as I don't need to ship the game with an entire fucking web browser, because that's just lame.

Shitting on Unity is hip, but there's plenty of good Unity games. The reason why people think that Unity is only for shit games is because of their retarded licensing: free version of Unity has the "made in unity" splash, while paid versions (used by any semi-serious project) have it removed.

Unity however can't do "plain" 2D games, it's still 3D engine with all the bells and whistles, so a simple pacman game in Unity will probably require "min 1 GB RAM and Nvidia 8xxx or newer" or some shit, so it might be better to grab Game Maker instead (or Godot if you want something libre)

There's a handful of more low-level stuff that's still not bare bones (SDL, FNA, LOVE, etc.), but without an engine it'll take a while to get to the actual game development. If you're going to write some kind of simple platformer from scratch, you'll spend weeks on physics engine, entity system, resource management, etc. and it's very demotivating. If you want to learn something, go for it, it's good experience, but never do this for a project you want to finish, unless you're on a competent team.