I am at that phase in a game's creation where there is no concrete concept on my mind, just a bunch of alienated fragments of stuff I think is neat-o. I have a general artistic theme in mind and a few other things, but random ideas are still churning in my mind and I am wondering what exactly I want to devote many long hours of evenings, early mornings, and weekends to. What I am asking, is that since my game isn't even at the point where I have a specific platform in mind (e.g. iOS, Android, PC, Ouya, etc.) or that platform's constraints, what platforms have you had good experiences developing for, as in efficient programming, sales, user discovery, portability, etc?

P.S: Even if you haven't developed for one of the listed platforms, I welcome your opinion with wide open hairy Sasquatch arms.

While not really accessible for small/casual devs, I had good experience working on the X360 particularily compared to PS3 or other devices. People throw flak at MS, but their developer tools really are the best out there, and they did so much to streamline cross PC/X360 development as possible. Debugging X360 in real time, PIX, and basically having all the ordinary PC-development tools readily accessible on the console was so nice.

haven't dabbled in iOs / Android dev, but I've heard its a nightmare. I did consider doing HTML5 (not exactly a platform but...) which also looked like a bit of a mess (aka needings tons of hacks to make sure it works properly on most browsers).

Thanks. X360 is way too out of my league, though I'm not sure I would want it to be in it...

I did consider doing HTML5 (not exactly a platform but...) which also looked like a bit of a mess (aka needings tons of hacks to make sure it works properly on most browsers).

This is going to be the case with pretty much anything that's multiplatform.

Also is it bad I have a better time with the Mega Drive than with PCs? Seriously, at least the former will not throw weird stuff at me, and that's considering I seriously abuse it (no, I don't use SGDK, I program the bare hardware directly) =P It sometimes annoys me that I can get a program on a 7.67MHz CPU run smoother than the OS in my 3.06GHz system...

[quote name='Koobazaur' timestamp='1349206923' post='4986165']I did consider doing HTML5 (not exactly a platform but...) which also looked like a bit of a mess (aka needings tons of hacks to make sure it works properly on most browsers).

This is going to be the case with pretty much anything that's multiplatform.

[/quote]

Not exactly, since with HTML5 coding you not only need to worry about supporting every platform, but also every browser, and like 20 version of each concurrently. There's only really one version of X360 or PS3 firmware/SDK you need to support.

I am at that phase in a game's creation where there is no concrete concept on my mind, just a bunch of alienated fragments of stuff I think is neat-o. I have a general artistic theme in mind and a few other things, but random ideas are still churning in my mind and I am wondering what exactly I want to devote many long hours of evenings, early mornings, and weekends to.

You should want to dedicate your "long hours of evenings, early mornings, and weekends" to designing your game. If you don't even have a concrete idea yet, it is way too early to be thinking about business decisions (such as the target platform).