Hey, I'd like to make a text and image-based adventure game, with a pretty shell, sprites, and backgrounds like this mockup I made. I also want to have a main menu with buttons that looks like this.
Do you guys know the best/easiest engine to do this with? I am familiar with C++ but am not committed to any particular language.
Unity might be your best bet. Free to use and there are a lot of good UI plug-ins you can buy for just a couple bucks that would make developing a heavily UI-driven game like that easier to make. The scripting is all in C#, so you can pick that up np.