Just came across this rather interesting project that just might help me out in my quest to become a game developer
http://gi.kamron.net/english/index.php
The game incubator works by abstracting all of the low level features that makes a game work ... kinda like a game engine, but a lot more abstracted than usual.
A demo can be seen here, and it looks pretty darn good for such a small amount of code
I'll definitely be playing with this one.