There are a ton of good game engines out there. If you're making a 2D zelda-like, your best options are probably things like Gamemaker , LÖVE2D , or Godot. If you want to make it real tiny you could even make it in PICO-8.

Unity is a classic for these things but I found it cumbersome to use for the while I did, especially for 2D games, and many people stopped using Unity as their game engine after the pricing issue.

My personal recommendation is Godot. I spent a long time using Unreal Engine, Unity, and Gamemaker, but ultimately Godot is the only engine that clicked with me. It's not everyone's preference and that's okay, but I do recommend it after using it for multiple years.

You specifically point out wanting to get started pretty fast with it, paint tiles and get moving, and I'm not aware of any game engines that will get you the exact thing you want out-of-the-box without also imposing incredible limitations, it will all take some amount of setup and custom code to get started. Godot can get you pretty close and pretty fast.

There's a tutorial series by Heartbeast, Godot 4 Action RPG on doing pretty much this exact thing in Godot 4. (Sorry, I couldn't find a version of that video on a federated platform, so youtube link)

No matter what you choose, I hope you show us what you make! Good luck with it all!

I've never used it, but https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/ might be what you are looking for

If you want to make a 2D Zelda style game, there's the Solaris engine, which is purpose built for that very task.

It's open-source and completely free to use.

I just want something that will say : here’s your main, here’s your player character, we’ve taken care of the collision detection and inputs and rendering, there’s no gravity. Paint the tiles on this screen, and get going.

Are you looking for a framework or a game engine? You talk about frameworks in the post but it sounds like you actually want something that does everything for you, which is more in line with engines. There are a lot of 2D engines out there like Godot, Unity, GameMaker etc. that are all pretty easy to use.

I used Unity in the past but am mostly a Godot fan nowadays. Try Godot, it might be what you're looking for.

• HaxeFlixel is a popular choice for 2D stuff. You can use it with Tiled or LDTK for level editing. This sounds more like what you're looking for

• Defold might interest you as it has a full editor built in, though I've barely used it so don't ask if it's good

• Gamemaker is a classic, but idk what pricing is like nowadays

• Godot will work, but I don't like it. Once you get past the highly polished editor, everything else kinda sucks

You might like Love2d, it's a Lua framework that just lets you start coding, no editors or anything.

I just want something that will say : here’s your main, here’s your player character, we’ve taken care of the collision detection and inputs and rendering, there’s no gravity. Paint the tiles on this screen, and get going.

So are you looking for less of a framework/engine and more of a genre template thing? I'm not quite familiar with those, but Godot is a general purpose royalty-free engine, and I've seen templates before for a Zelda-style game, so that might be something worth checking out. It's pretty simple to extend or change what you need.