What are your thoughts on Lua Love [1] ? I have done some Unity, Unreal, Pygame, Processing, etc. And Love has always had the shortest time from idea to running sketch.
I've found Lua engines like Love to be great for prototypes and gamejams but when it comes to implementing a full game its not as good as the full blown engines like Unity/Godot.
If your game has more than trivial amount of UI, particle-systems, 3D, etc then it becomes very time consuming. To write and tweak a full blown responsive UI like in-game windows, alerts, animations etc with code-only is not trivial. With a full-featured editor like Unity and Godot, UI, particles, tweened-animations and such becomes much easier as you can keep interactively tweak things around until its perfect without the edit-code & recompile cycle.
There's also King's "Defold" engine which uses Lua and has a visual editor but the last time I used it over a year ago, I found there was almost no in-game UI libraries so although making the prototype was fun and relatively easy adding UI became difficult.
It is more for quick sketches that are interactive, or designing animation that would be too difficult in Blender or After Effects. While folks do make full blown games with it, for me it is more of a interactive animation workbench.
If your game has more than trivial amount of UI, particle-systems, 3D, etc then it becomes very time consuming. To write and tweak a full blown responsive UI like in-game windows, alerts, animations etc with code-only is not trivial. With a full-featured editor like Unity and Godot, UI, particles, tweened-animations and such becomes much easier as you can keep interactively tweak things around until its perfect without the edit-code & recompile cycle.
There's also King's "Defold" engine which uses Lua and has a visual editor but the last time I used it over a year ago, I found there was almost no in-game UI libraries so although making the prototype was fun and relatively easy adding UI became difficult.