Well, so in addition to the larger game project I'm working on, a friend and I decided to try collaborating on some small (jam-sized) games. We needed to pick a "neutral zone" engine or framework, because I didn't wanna use C++ and he didn't really wanna use Rust; after considering FNA, Godot, and Löve2D, we eventually settled on Love.

Love's a code-first framework that doesn't have an editor like Godot or GameMaker do. But its ecosystem of tricks and add-ons is fairly massive, and it also has one nearly-unique superpower: if you buy a game that's made with the Love engine, you can almost always run the .exe through unzip or 7zip and dump the entire source code. You can just read the whole game. Now, there aren't a ton of famous games in this engine, but there are a handful of best-in-class ones: Balatro, Blue Revolver: Double Action, Gravity Circuit, Arco, Moonring, Eat Girl. Being able to go see exactly how an ambitious game of known quality approached a problem (and which 3rd-party libraries they used, and and and) is an incredible boost, so I'd really recommend any hungry game dev mess around in Love at least a bit.

Okay, so Love expects you to write all your game code in the Lua language. Lua is mostly "small" and mostly "simple." ...Mostly. There's a couple of slightly off-road choices in the language you've gotta adapt to. Since I just had to run all this stuff down myself, I think I'm in a pretty good position to write

Lua real fast for people who know a couple other languages

...which was exactly what I wanted a few days ago and couldn't quite find.

( And here we go!!! )