[trevorhinesley]

To the OP, try DragonRuby for your next game if you miss hot reloading but like the scripting, code-first nature of LÖVE. It’s also cross-platform. Not sponsored, just a big fan and it scratches many of the same itches as you described with LÖVE.

[vunderba]

Hmmm. DragonRuby seems to be a closed source proprietary game engine (at least as far as I can tell). With open source engines like Love2D / Godot / PhaserJS / Pyxel becoming more popular - this may be a deterrent for many devs on HN.

Something else to consider is traction, if you get stuck in DragonRuby there's probably not a huge amount of docs/tutorials around it. That being said, it does seem like they have a pretty active Discord at least.

[trevorhinesley]

> DragonRuby seems to be a closed source proprietary game engine

Yes, but check out: https://docs.dragonruby.org/#/misc/faq?id=dragonruby-is-not-...

And

https://docs.dragonruby.org/#/misc/faq?id=what-if-i-build-so...

> If you get stuck in DragonRuby there’s probably not a huge amount of docs/tutorials around it.

You’d be surprised. The docs are extensive and there are sample games galore in the distro. https://docs.dragonruby.org/#/

Also the Discord is incredibly helpful and the creators chime in regularly.

It’s a pretty special engine and community IMO

[vunderba]

I totally get it - I'm not definitely not casting aspersions on their choice to go commercial with it. I just feel like with the insane Unity pricing restructuring (which they ultimately rolled back) - a lot of game devs have been pretty gun shy about investing in another proprietary engine.

That said, we can always use more game engines / frameworks!

[je42]

Love 2d can be quickly extended with hot reloading. See https://github.com/rxi/lurker

[trevorhinesley]

That’s awesome! It’s been a core feature of DragonRuby since the start, and they share similar framework values from what I can tell. It’s worth a look. I’m not the biggest Lua fan, personally, so DragonRuby scratches the right itch.

[jasonhr13]

I prototyped a game in a few frameworks/engines, namely: Godot, GMS, Defold, Love, and DragonRuby. I ended up sticking with DR because I found the api the most intuitive, and because I’m a career ruby dev and just can’t get myself to enjoy Lua. I find DR and Love to both be fantastic for those who just want to code.

[trevorhinesley]

Preach! Similar experience here. Agreed on Lua too. Love that some people dig Lua; to each their own, it’s just not for me.

[d3VwsX]

I never was a big fan of Lua and that was something that kept me from looking closer at Löve, but a few months ago I discovered fennel (Lisp-like that transpiles to Lua) and that you can use that to write Löve games.

This looks like an up-to-date introduction:

https://itch.io/jam/love2d-jam-2024/topic/3484009/getting-st...

The "absolutely minimal Löve 2D fennel" repo was useful to me as I found the other templates a bit bloated (but possibly those are more useful for real-world projects beyond small experiments?):

https://sr.ht/~benthor/absolutely-minimal-love2d-fennel/

I did find that startup-time was bad for Fennel om some very low-end devices, or when running even a small game using LoveDOS in DOSBox, so I set up my test-projects to pre-compile the fennel-code to Lua as part of building the .love-files and that solved that problem.