Visual Studio Express is a little bit weird. It's separated into a few different versions. I personally use their professional version, but I believe that the version you'd need is called "Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop." Express should provide all the features you could ever need

Actually Microsoft just released the community edition of visual studio for free, which has all the pro features such as plugin support.

http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs.aspx

Thanks, getting at the bottom of all these versions and what gets updated these days.

Says only "Update 4" vs the Express 2013 which says "Update 4 for desktop", i assume the Community one includes all the different versions?

UDK isn't really a Thing any more; it is no longer being updated.

Instead if you are interested in getting hold of the Unreal Engine to use then you should be looking at UE4 at http://www.unrealengine.com.

Thanks, noticed that UE4 it's only paid for and rather give Unity a go and take it from there, do you know about C# compilers?

I see there's only MS Visual Studio Express (not sure how limiting this version is) and Mono which i know nothing about, seems interesting because it runs on other platforms as well, which one should i pick?

Be aware that while UE4 has no "free" version at the moment, their sub is not only quite lowcost (20$), but you can also get the full engine for the cost of 20$, with source, and never pay again (if you don't need updates that is).

Yes, Unity free is cheaper, and with your goals, you probably will never need the advanced features of the Pro version (or what UE4 already includes in the 20$)... just pointing out that "free" and 20$ aren't worlds apart.

Having said that, AFAIK community of Unity is still bigger, and the asset store and documentation is really mature. No idea if UE4 has caught up yet in these things, but you can do much worse than pick Unity as your first engine (alrough what earlier posters have written about going with an engine vs going from scratch still applies).

If you pick Unity, you have the option of installing it together with MonoDevelop, which comes bundled with the Unity engine. Not saying it is the best IDE ever, or that it can beat Visual Studio... Still, I am using MonoDevelop since starting with Unity, and actually cannot complain too much. Had to use so many different IDEs at work, and actually preferring simple Editors over IDEs most of the time, I take the simplicity of getting it installed together with the engine over nice features I will probably not use.

Of course, if you prefer a good IDE, Visual Studio will most probably beat MonoDevelop.

Unity is pretty much the indie engine of choice right now. You can do 2d or 3d or some of each. It outputs to lots of platforms. There is a huge community that is helpful. You can buy things on the asset store if you are lazy or art challenged. Constantly updated. Takes imports from many art programs like Maya, Blender, many others.

If the main goal is to learn programming, as it sounds like, then I'd suggest finding a simple environment that lets you easily get visual output. For example, start with JavaScript and EaselJS.

When I was first learning to program, I had loads of fun producing all sorts of 2D outputs. Some were static (I'd write individual pixels to create a simple mathematically defined image), some were animated toys (firework screensavers and the like), and some involved interaction (when I started to delve into making games). The key was that I didn't need to learn a large mature framework to get started and take a bunch of stuff on faith. I just needed to learn the basic programming constructs (the essence of what I was initially wanting to learn anyway), as well as a few basic drawing commands, such as setting a pixel color, filling a rectangle, or drawing a line between two points. The visual output was very clearly and directly tied to the code that I wrote, which was highly motivational. Frameworks often had too much "magic" in between my code and the output for me to easily make sense of what was going on; I had to slowly build up my understanding of software engineering before I could effectively use them. On the other end of the spectrum, console output was just way too dull to be motivating for very long. A simple 2D canvas was the perfect happy medium for me.

so many comments

anyway unity is good for learning. I learnt from Jonathan Weinberger the youtuber