Is Love2D really for me?

[MaxGamz]

I have coding experience and I do love the idea of making games even if I rarely play them, but I feel like I’m stressing myself because I want to sharpen my skills but it feels daunting trying to understand everything from the ground up. Especially since Love2D is more coding intensive. I like programming but there are still concepts that I need to learn and improve on but I feel like a regular game engine would suit me best for now, I’m not sure if I should continue on.

[duaner]

Love is about as easy as it gets. Even if you use an engine, you're going to have to do some scripting, which means you still have to learn an api and possibly a new language. I've been using godot and love recently, and godot seems much more complicated to me -- I don't have to write as much code, but it's more difficult.

[MaxGamz]

Love is about as easy as it gets. Even if you use an engine, you're going to have to do some scripting, which means you still have to learn an api and possibly a new language. I've been using godot and love recently, and godot seems much more complicated to me -- I don't have to write as much code, but it's more difficult.

I do find it easy, but I struggle trying to understand more complicated topics and when I hit a road block I give up

[duaner]

when I hit a road block I give up

You're going to run into walls no matter what sort of programming you do. No one can force you to keep going if you don't want to. The only difference the programming tools make is to how much you enjoy what you're doing.

For example, some people are very visually oriented and have more fun working with the godot ide than with a text editor. Of course that means they're going to have a harder time if they want to use c# in their project, so they mainly use gdscript. If that motivates you to keep going, you'd be better off working with an engine.

On the other hand, some people stick with unity because there are lots of pre-made components they can just plug into their project if they decide it's too much trouble to make their own. Of course that can be pricey.

Maybe you should ask yourself whether you'd rather build an animation by dragging around a lot of components into a complicated diagram, or writing some complicated code in an editor.

[Azzla]

If you like programming, I think Love will improve your coding habits quicker than other engines. It doesn't hold your hand, and if you (like me) suffer from scope-creep while developing you will be forced to rectify your own mistakes, over and over. You have to experiment and tinker and read documentation and think creatively on how to code solutions.

For me, that's the big selling point of Love - lightweight, simple, and flexible. Flexibility is not something that every developer values, however, because more flexibility usually means less rails. Some tasks will take a lot more work to accomplish with Love than in an engine like Godot; UI for example. Love's api is minimally abstracted, meaning you don't get as many drag-n-drop/plug-n-play toolsets, you have to figure out how many aspects of games function on a lower level.

In conclusion, there is no reason you should force yourself to use Love. Understand it's benefits and sacrifices, and decide what appeals you the most. For what's it's worth, I think Love is way easier to get started with than an engine like Unity or Godot.

[zingo]

From what I understand Love2d is a "framework", as opposed to an "engine". I'm not entirely sure what the differences are, however, my experience is that Love2d is ultimately more flexible (for 2d games, at least) than an engine like Godot, Gamemaker, or Unity, because the user more or less builds their project from scratch by coding its various parts in Lua (or glsl for shaders), while it handles a lot of the "heavy lifting" such as rendering graphics, playing audio, physics, input, etc.

The complexity of your game, therefore, is almost entirely up to you, because very little is "pre-defined" (unless you use various libraries or examples that other users have created). I've personally found Lua to be a fairly easy language to learn (compared to C, or Python, for example), and so far, the community has been very helpful and friendly.

As to whether Love2d is for you (or anyone else), I believe that depends on how much time/energy you are willing/able to spend on your project. If you don't want to fuss with all the messy mechanics typically hidden "under the hood", and just want to start assembling your game right away, then I'd recommend going with an "engine" like Godot. However, if you have both the patience, and determination to build something from the ground up, then Love2d is an excellent toolchest, with a great community, and robust documentation.

[KvLT]

Love is about as easy as it gets. Even if you use an engine, you're going to have to do some scripting, which means you still have to learn an api and possibly a new language. I've been using godot and love recently, and godot seems much more complicated to me -- I don't have to write as much code, but it's more difficult.

So far, this has kind of been my conclusion as well (even though I'm very much a beginner in my gamedev journey!). We're all different, but personally I'd rather use a code-based engine without having to mess with a bunch of GUI nodes in Godot... but I'm sure the reverse is true for a lot of other people.

[GVovkiv]

It seems nobody yet recommended this, but just try to build fairly simple game in both engine like Godot and in love2d.

With Godot, you, probably, would spend more time reading documentation, examples, etc on how engine works, because almost anything that you might ever need is already there, you just need to learn how to use it.
With love, most of your time would be spend on finding solutions. For example, love2d doesn't provide json support if you want to store data in it, you can write your own json implementation or use someone's else library. Or some pathfinding. Or maybe even scenes loader, etc.

Pick something like fnaf (because it's fairly easy game, but it touch most of basic stuff, such as scrolling, mouse collisions, animations, some UI, some basic AI, sounds, maybe some ambient music, etc), make some simple textures and animations, and make clone of it.
And you would learn, what you like more: engine or framework experience.

[duaner]

Unfortunately, it took me about three years to figure out which I preferred. I can't say it was wasted time, but I sort of wish I'd focused less on features and more on how I like to program.

[Hugues Ross]

Everyone else has already given some good takes, but why not throw mine in too: Try other engines for a bit.

The reason I chose to use Love is because I sat down with over half a dozen different assorted engines and frameworks, gave each one a week of my time, then decided which I felt most productive and comfortable in at the end. Everyone has different tastes and priorities, so I think this is a good approach to take in general when you're not sure what you want to work with.