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[WellThen]

I'm curious to know what major games, both indie and nonindie use to make their games, desktop or mobile. Are most of them coded from the ground up in Java/C++/C#?
I know that Terry used flash for Super Hexagon, angry birds used box2D for part of it, and Bag It used Unity  but if anybody knows any others...

[Polly]

Check out TIGdb and Desura. Both sites mention which engine a game has been made with / let you search for games made with a certain engine. Also, Wikipedia has a modest list of games sorted by engine.

[Terry]

I wouldn't necessarily *recommend* flash to anyone planning on making an iOS game. It just happens to suit me because I've been using flash for years, and have gotten really comfortable with it. There are lots of other alternatives that are much less of a headache...

[Serapth]

Check this out.  It's a list of 20 of the most popular 3D engines, platforms they support, sample games made with each, etc.

[randomnine]

If you can buy it on a disk then it's mostly written in C++, possibly with some scripting in Lua and Python or a custom language and potentially with tools coded in C#. "Written from the ground up" doesn't really apply; either an engine will be licensed, typically Unreal Engine (especially if it's a shooter), or a studio/publisher will have a codebase going back a decade or longer which has been gradually expanded and adapted over the course of several games and will rely on appropriate middleware to fill some gaps (eg FMOD, Havok, PhysX, Bink, Scaleform, Speedtree). The line between these two approaches is kinda blurry - eg DICE's codebase is now branded "Frostbite", which more or less amounts to slapping a logo on the source code for the latest Battlefield, and other EA studios are using it to make several other games including the next Command & Conquer. Basically, existing code for a full game is usually drawn from somewhere and repurposed for whatever you're making. You can call it an engine if you like.

If there's any true "from scratch" development going on atm, it'll be targeting next gen consoles. Different architecture, different requirements, different capabilities. Otherwise... if you're making a game that'll run on XBox 360, for example, you might as well start with working code for a 360 game. There's enough of it about.

[st33d]

I wouldn't necessarily *recommend* flash

Aaand that's all you need to know. I really am fed up with Flash. They don't allow you to create executables from the desktop projector anymore - they want you to build it in AIR, which goes so mental asking for permissions on install that it looks very much like malware. They won't support controllers - despite being asked over and over again. And don't get me started on the IDE:

http://twitter.com/FlashHasCrashed

I mean, AS3 is great and all, but Adobe are such consumate wankers that the platform isn't going to survive. Once I'm done with Red Rogue and Flightless I'm getting the fuck out of Dodge.

[WellThen]

Wow! I didn't expect so many responses! Thanks guys!
TigDB is a really good resource, thanks!

As for Terry, I already knew flash was pretty bad, but after reading this article, I thought flash wasn't as bad. I'll take it from an actual game developer instead  .

I'm not the best at programming yet, but I feel like I should be learning some. For now, I'm using stencyl because it's speedier and doesn't require a lot of knowledge of programming. For my more ambitious ideas, I probably will use an actual language.

[WellThen]

Wow! Cut the rope was made with marmalade!

[ThemsAllTook]

As for Terry, I already knew flash was pretty bad, but after reading this article, I thought flash wasn't as bad. I'll take it from an actual game developer instead  .

That's the tricky thing about Flash; at a glance, or even after working with it for a few days, it'll look perfectly capable. Once you've lived with it for a while, though, the annoyances really start piling up, to the point where it becomes almost completely unusable. I'd use Flash if I was making a game targeting Kongregate or something similar, but definitely not for any other case.

[Xienen]

Damn! I had no idea there was anything but high praise for Flash, particularly in the indie dev realm...guess I'll continue to stay away from it for the foreseeable future