I really like it, the developer experience is so smooth for beginners, just drag a zip onto the exe and it starts. And the APIs are simple enough to memorize while allowing pretty cool rendering stuff.
I once checked if the odds stated on a card were implemented wrong. Turns out no, the code checks out, I'm just that unlucky.
For example in Sid Meier’s Memoir, this is mentioned.
Quoting from a review of said book:
> People hate randomness: To placate people's busted sense of randomness and overdeveloped sense of fairness, Civ Revolutions had to implement some interesting decisions: any 3:1 battle in favor of human became a guaranteed win. Too many randomly bad outcomes in a row were mitigated.
https://smus.com/books/sid-meiers-memoir/
Some threads on randomness and perceived fairness in video games can be found here on HN too, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19399044
The original link being discussed in that thread is 404 now, but archived copies of the original link exist such as for example https://archive.is/8eVqt
I've long been suspicious of the RNG/seed implementation.. but not curious enough to automate testing of it, though.
For that, I'll keep this in mind: "Unlucky players may look at the source code of a chance-based effect to check if the odds are actually as stated."
The Steam version was created by one guy, but the platform ports have a couple different authors. The Google Play and Xbox PC versions, for instance, have divergences.
I wonder how the ports influence the upstream and each other. How do they keep the codebases in sync, while also accounting for platform differences?
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/by-name/ba...
I wrote half a blog post when I did the derivation. One day, I should finish it and post it here.
[1]: https://projecthawkthorne.com/
It is now available to play straight in the browser(I guess using LÖVE Web Builder?).
[1]:https://schellingb.github.io/LoveWebBuilder/
This engine has really come a long way and enabled such a memorable game for me.
Maybe because you can fit the whole language spec on a single sheet of paper and adding more advanced features is pretty easy.
Love looks really cool. I never got into it personally but I still might
Thanks for the tip. That should make for a fun weekend
It was chosen around 2008 or so to be the scripting language in Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas.
We build entire worlds in Lua, there were many gamemodes, but my favorite was Roleplay.
Good old carefree times.
Also move or die is running on love2d, which is an awesome game.
Also I love that trick that you can just zip your files and binary Comcast them to the love2d binary and it will load it.
The SDL3 GPU API[1] provided a cross-platform GPU API even before WebGPU.
In Rust it's a good alternative for winit/wgpu. For that reason I added it to areweguiyet.com[2] last week, where apparently it wasn't even listed before.
I am currently using it to develop a space game[3] inspired by the original BBC Elite. Using emscripten to get on the web and QUIC/Webtransport for networking.
[1]: https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/CategoryGPU
[2]: https://areweguiyet.com/#ecosystem
[3]: https://git.levitati.ng/LevitatingBusinessMan/elite/src/bran...
[1] https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/issues/11148#issuecomment-...
I see why people might hate Lua. Especially for game dev!
On top of that there are love2d specific libraries people have written to deal with 2D games like GUIs and tile libraries.
Then there is the ease of debugging, where you can use lua to have runtime access to the table of variables and can print them on screen if you need to, not to mention dynamically loading new update and draw and input functions.
This is all to say that just downloading SDL is not going to get anywhere close to what love2d has included.
Author is currently building version 12 which will be using SDL3. But it's been in development for quite some time with no clear end date afaik.
That obviously isn't a replacement for the framework but it is perfectly doable if someone just wants to write a game in Lua with minimal overhead.
Edit: I mention LuaJIT specifically because it lets you create metaclasses around C objects, which is much easier than messing with the Lua stack from C, and it's easy to make a 2d vector class from an SDL Point or a spritesheet or what have you. There are a few rough edges like dealing with pointers and gc but to me it's the best of both worlds (the speed of C, and some implicit type checking, and the flexibility of Lua.)
Obviously you could do it the hard way and the other way around with normal modern Lua but it's such a pain in the ass.
Lua is so small and simple (but not simplistic) that you can keep it completely in your head. Even if you only get to work on your project once every weekend you won’t have to relearn half of it every time.
The Launcher is available also for old Android versions, which means that old obsolete Android devices (I have some tablets and phones) can be used for whatever it can be fun to still write some GUI for on some spare touchscreen device.
I think love2d is better if what you love is coding, everything is code, love2d just executes Lua.
If what someone wants to do is make (for example) a 2d platformer, or definately for 3d, and the coding is something you need to do to make your game, goody is better, it includes so many batteries, have a built in gui level editor, etc.
One big advantage of love2d (although ironically not loved by many in its audience) is it is the AI friendly engine, as AIs love text and hate GUIs.
Löve on the other hand is 100% just code. You'll not have the gui things and the pletora of different components that go with them. Still gives you freedom. Just too much freedom and not as much helpful preset tools.
That said, i'm not impressed. A web-based solution is usually better performing, despite all the bloatware necessary. This says a lot about the state of software development unfortunately.
there isnt step 2, explain is over
60MB+ for a calculator is not optimal.
"Heavy processing delegated to webworkers?" That just sounds like threads but worse.
There are a lot of free-as-in-freedom alternatives to (and clones of) PICO-8, but TIC-80 is indeed the most popular one, by far. And popularity is important for any software ecosystem. I really like that it supports other languages, even if that kinda inhibits its ability to be embedded into small hardware.
Apparently the nightly release supports DCPM samples now. Dunno why.
https://itch.io/jam/love2d-jam-2026/topic/6082771/how-to-get...
... posted in the site of the 2026 Löve2D Game Jam, that sounds like something also worth mentioning: https://itch.io/jam/love2d-jam-2026
Too late to enter. Jam was last month. But there are 47 games to check out there, plus many from previous years.
(Throwing diacritics on English words look extremely silly to me, since I know how åäö are supposed to be pronounced. It makes something like Motorhead just sound laughable rather than metal.)