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so im trying to make a game where i need collisions. not the the really advanced polygon colliders needing a harvard student to figure out, like im just trying to detect if a ball is touching the paddle in a pong game. please help

You can search this forum or any dev blog for AABB collisions. In your case, pretend the ball is actually a square and the paddle is a rectangle and you'll get an idea, noting AABB assumes both objects are square-ish.

Or you can use love.physics module for collisions, but this is more difficult to start with.

You can safely approximate the shape of the ball with its bounding rectangle, and the same for the paddle(s).
This becomes a rectangle-to-rectangle collision which is a great thing to learn about (the AABB thing that TogFox is talking about).
Check out these links, in this order:

• https://sheepolution.com/learn/book/13

• https://jonathanwhiting.com/tutorial/collision/

• viewtopic.php?t=95808