I've just taken a quick look at SDL (By quick I mean literally 1 hour) And I can already draw a box and make it move. I think this would be the best way to do it. This, SMFL or XNA. I have books on XNA, C# and C++ so which ever one we go for I'm prepared. I've also got a £500 gift voucher for Amazon (Won it in a programming competition for under 18's) so If we need any books I can get one or two. Still gotta order that new monitor though.
Yeah, I feel like putting a big Dunce cap on me now
Although you can freely distribute anything you make with XNA, don't expect it to run on anything other than Windows XP / Vista (Doesn't even work properly on Windows 7)
You could run it on the XBox 360 or the Zune HD but not really advisable for this type of game...
no problem I worked with XNA too for some time but in the end it had to much limitations and when i saw the "compiling" which only meant to be playable when installing XNA Framework etc i just gave it up.
I'm probably gonna sound really stupid saying this, but if we use a language that means toonstruck 2 could be played in ScummVM, couldn't ScummVM be used for the cross platform? i know it runs on pretty much everything.