Warning -- SDL is not a game engine by any means. It currently lacks basic primatives and things that keep programmers from expressing ideas such as "draw a square" simply.
Having written a few games in the past (experience in QBasic, Pascal, Assembler, C++ w/ Allegro, Tk, and OpenGL), SDL is a horrible place to throw a beginner. Once you feel up to the task (and provided you run something that has good/better SDL support) -- Perl + SDL may be ok. Until then, Perl + OpenGL may be a better option, or even C++ and OpenGL. Or Python + PyGame.
This is meant to dissuade gaming-beginers, not gaming experts. Those who want can make all of these work in Perl, it just won't be as easy as picking up PyGame or using C++ and OpenGL.
Game programming is quite fun, and I love doing it when I can find time... I'd just say that saying "SDL is what you want", well, it's misleading. SDL is a framework (and a hard to compile one when we are speaking of Perl bindings), it's prone to crashing/locking-up if not done right, etc...
This isn't a failing of SDL, it's just to say that SDL is nothing more than a hardware abstraction layer and a few other things. A quality game/sound library it is not.
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I didn't say it was a beginners' library, but it IS a graphics library, and a good portable one at that.
You might want to see frozen-bubble for a good and complete 2D graphics game implemented entirely in a few hundred lines of Perl, using SDL with Perl bindings.
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I've seen frozen bubble's source. It should also be noted that there is a lot of frame-buffer and abstraction code that had to be written to make SDL even barely usable. Frozen bubble is a great game, but the modularity and design of the source leaves a lot to be desired. It's probably a source for reverse engineering SDL, but it's not an example of quality coding -- though the result is indeed very very nice.
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