[jay_kyburz]

I'm thinking about going back to 2d. If Factorio and Slay The Spire can be smash hits in 2d, perhaps I can as well :)

I'm a fan of Love but I have to admit the amount of Lua I wrote for just my prototypes did start to get a little scary.

I might have a play with raylib.

[mnk47]

If you like or don't mind using Go, check out Ebiten as well. I think it's similar to Raylib in spirit, but it also supports Nintendo Switch, iOS and Xbox. IIRC it uses native graphics APIs (Metal for MacOS, DirectX for Windows) while Raylib just uses OpenGL.

[cmovq]

Interestingly both of the games you mentioned use custom engines. I think people overestimate the difficulty of rolling out your own 2D engine.