Is Love2D really for me?

[tourgen]

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.

So you have the drive. Now get good. You will need math and a lot of it. Become very comfortable with calculus and trigonometry. A game engine will not hide these core, fundamental skill requirements. You MUST learn enough math to build a game, even a 2D game. Learn some linear algebra as well. Become familiar and lovingly close to maps. Mapping one space to another. Mapping from gamemap space to screen space etc. You might not be ready for this yet. Pay attention in class.

[JohnMclaughlin]

For me engines are too clunky to use. Too much time's spent on waiting when for example Unity scripts reload for several seconds. But it wouldn't bother me if some real problems didn't come out. I don't want to be a developer to fix some problems in engine's core. Eventually, I think I will be fixing NVidia drivers at the end if I'm not gonna stop doing it.

For example: I used Godot for a while and the first thing I stumbled upon is lack of proper physics interpolation. You have to overcome this issue using interpolation yourself. Most of the time you go back and forth with your nodes from _process to _physics_process and turn it on and off using another node when they're offscreen wasting CPU power or when a sprite needs to teleport. It'll never be stable until they fix it but I think it's a core issue so it's not gonna be easy to fix if it'll ever be fixed. If you have a monitor with 250hz and physics set to 60fps you gonna notice what I'm talking about. Somebody doesn't care at all about all those things. You can use smooth plugins but it's sort of a crutch. When you want to work with rigidbody you can't manipulate it directly therefore can't smooth it only if you apply interpolation between visuals(sprite or 3d material) that follow rigidbody again using another node for that. Only one little thing and it can demand so much attention.

I was quite surprised with LOVE and its stability maybe because I ate already too much s... with those engines. And threads are so easy to use and effective. LOVE uses Box2D as physics engine as far as I know without any jitter movements. I honestly can't believe that. Sometimes Godot has stutter movements in almost empty project for no reason every 10-20 seconds without using physics at all.

Don't forget to check your sanity regularly when you're working with game engines.