Irrlicht vs TIC-80

Many working examples to study and learn. You can easily experiment modifying an example code to grok in full how the engine works. In the beginning of your learning curve, the example code will offer you many useful code snippets.

If you are considering writing your own engine with openGL, you might want to consider Irrlicht instead. It makes many features of any engine worth its salt easy, including events, serialization, nodes, animators, materials, logging, and animation. Bring your own sound and networking.

Especially if you compile it yourself, it can be very light in memory usage.

If you want to start game developing with C++, then Irrlicht is a good candidate since it removes most of the complications in game making in C++. It will let you obtain experience in programming and games at the same time.

This engine supports multiple formats for 3D objects and textures.

The app contains tools for coding, sprite editing, map editing, sfx and music editing.

Free version already includes most features but a paid version is available.

Pixelated Software with a good retro style.

Use awesome scripting languages like: Lua, Wren, Moonscript, JS, Ruby, etc.

Exports easily to Windows, Windows-XP, mac, Linux and HTML.

You can imagine this engine Shiva Lua scripting language making 2d side scrolling Megaman style games a Bandai trademark.