Take a look at the Arc library (http://www.dsource.org/projects/arcgames). It is nicer than plain SDL and has the advantage of hardware accelerated graphics.
The server with the Asteroids tutorial is currently down but commented source is available from http://svn.dsource.org/projects/arcgames/downloads/zipfiles/games/asteroidspkg.zip.
That should give you an idea of where to start.

In general: as long as you are doing a simple top-down or side view plain, software 2D (what SDL gives you) is sufficient. In that case you won't need alot of animations either.
If you want a lot of effects (rotation, zooming, smoke, lights, particles, etc) you will have to learn OpenGL.

For everything else that falls under "uses perspective view and has animations" I would use 3D or at least prerendered 3D-models. This isn't necessarily less work or "easier", but the result will look better.