LÖVE

Hello,

I have recently found myself with a lot more free time than I would like but don't want to get back in to the finding a job rat race. I have always thought of different games and android apps I would like to develop, but that's all they have been... Ideas.

My question is assuming that I have the time to study and familiarize myself with the Love framwork, how long does it usually take to learn enough to be able to start creating games (assuming no previous programming knowledge besides basic web design).

Thank you.

Depends on your background.
It took me a couple months to get up to speed with LOVE 0.5.0's API.
But I imagine someone who is more adept at programming then I was could pick it up in a couple days.

Since I had worked a bit with Game Maker, I was able to get stuff going pretty much straight away. It will take a while to learn all you need to know, but start with a simple "hello world" and go from there. It will probably be easier than you think.

It depends on many things, listed below in no specific order.

- It takes time to learn Lua language itself. Just the basics should be enough.
- It takes time to get familiar with Love framework.
- It takes time to learn/understand specific techniques in game programming (I mean character animation, loading/saving data, side-scrolling, etc...)

Noone of these above is hard (i'll rather say extremely fun).Just have to be patient.
IMHO, if you have never used Lua language, then focus a bit on learning it. Then, dive into love, use tutorials on the wiki, ask questions about game logic, game programming techniques, start with simple games (Pong, Snake, Tic-Tac-Toe, hangman, etc..) and then end-up making nice games .
This page on the wiki should be useful.

It didn't take me too long, But when i started i had way too much free time so i could pretty much spend the whole day messing around with it, And i had some prior experience with programming. Just had to get used to the logic of game programming. If you play around with it alot, and follow some tutorials, read other peoples code etc. It shouldn't take you more than 2-3 weeks to be able to program simple games like pong or something.

Just check out some of the tutorials on the wiki. The one that really got me started was the gridlocked player one. There are also some user made video tutorials out there, Look up "love2d tutorial" or something like that on youtube, or even the forums.