Slick Forums

The good thing about Slick is that it's not locked down to any particular type of game or programming style. The hard stuff like getting smooth animation and playing audio is already handled for you. I've attempted to make a game library on my own using pure Java 2D and I can tell you the end result wasn't worth it.

I can't compare this to other libraries because I haven't tried them, but I can tell you it's definitely a lot better than trying to "roll your own." You can make a Slick game that runs with a good frame rate and is properly cross compatible with all the major operating systems. The work on your part would strictly be your game design.

The one thing Slick lacks is a built in framework for entities and such. I like this because I can make my own system for this. You ought to look at the if you want to use a library to handle it for you.