LÖVE

Hey! For a very long time I have dreamed of creating a metroidvania similar to Hollow knight or Dead cells, but the main obstacle was the choice of game engine.

I have been learning LUA for some time because of the game Balatro, which the creator of surprised me. From my point of view, the LÖVE engine seems to be really good, although I have come across some negative opinions.

Is the engine actually good enough? What stands in the way? Is there something I should pay attention to?

Hi
I have not played any of the games you mentioned although I know Metroidvania and just watched a Dead Cells video.
It seems each level in Dead Cells is not actually *that* big. At the end of a level you go through a portal and then it loads the next map.
Several people have created RPGs or platformers in Löve with levels that seem comparable in size to what I saw in the Dead Cells video. The shaders/lighting effects can be done in Löve too, I am not 100% certain on performance but would assume it is okay.
From technical side I do not see any impossible blockade. What points are you worried about?

I would say the difficulty will mostly be the scale of the project. Many graphics that need to be created, enemy AI, physics, menu systems etc. When the technical side is done, creating the game content will be lots of work too. (level editing, balance, audio, graphics etc)

Thanks for your reply!

Most of the problems mentioned such as making graphics, with editing levels or balance I can handle. I have already played around a bit with creation of AI enemies or physics, but I'm eager to sit down and get more educated on it. My main concern was the performance of the engine, about which I am not 100% sure, but after thinking about it for a while, I think I will decide to take the project work in LOVE.

(Here is a map of the Hollow Knight for reference https://www.hallownest.net/ )

Löve has a better performance than anything else i am aware of.

Agreed.

Löve uses LuaJIT as the script interpreter: https://luajit.org/luajit.html
LuaJIT has been extensively used in production (though that seems to be with servers, embedded systems etc rather than games) and is very fast.
Edit: there are many commercially successful games developed with LÖVE. There are free games as well, like on itch.io. You could try one or more and see how your system handles them. On my system I noticed that GameMaker games usually have a busy loop that eats up CPU, for example, which helped steer me towards LÖVE.

A "big map" is just an interconnected collection of small maps. Go wild.

I'm surprised no one mentioned Gravity Circuit here yet. It's a pretty full-sized platformer made with Löve: https://store.steampowered.com/app/8587 ... y_Circuit/

The engine is good enough. It's more or less as fast as anything else, and since it's a fairly low-level framework, it basically never gets in your way for anything. The only annoyance I've encountered in several years of using it is some restrictions on filesystem access, but you don't need that for games anyway. Besides that, I've only ever encountered new things that it can help me with, not restrictions. It's a great relief compared to bigger game engines.