Do Gideros and Corona have editors? It doesn’t look like it from their websites, which would be a serious consideration. Defold’s editor is nothing amazing, but it still makes development much faster than it would be in a text-only work environment. And if development is fast then you’re much more likely to actually release a game, even if it means giving up a few nice features that another engine has.
Love2D is pretty great, I’ve been working with it a lot lately, but realistically you should figure on a month or so of work building ‘engine’ code if you plan on making games of any complexity with it. It’s fast to build little prototypes and jam games, but go bigger and you’ll have a tangled mess pretty quickly if you don’t take the time to build some kind of structure.
Things I love about Löve:
- Desktop support - DefOS is a great project, but it’s not exactly equal to SDL. Defold is mobile/web focused, Love is more desktop focused. It has pretty much everything you need out of the box:
- Window features: fullscreen, borderless window, multiple monitor support, request attention, set position, size, title, icon, lock, maximize, minimize, restore, etc.
- Mouse features: get/set position, toggle visibility, lock to window, relative mode, use system-native or completely custom hardware cursors(!).
- Keyboard scancodes. (necessary for proper international/alternate layout support)
- Full Box2D access (almost) - joints, proper polygon support, CCD, edge shapes, multiple fixtures, get center of mass, get moment of inertia, synchronous raycasts (multi-hit), AABB, and point checking, dynamically modify or create any body you want…
- Decent audio support - play, pause, resume, stop, seek, set pitch, and positional audio stuff.
Stuff that isn’t so hot:
- Absolutely zero structure - no parent/child tree, no draw ordering, not even sprites or basic game components, nada. Flexible? Sure. Time consuming? Yup.
- No editor - Honestly I thought it would be worse working with only text, so far it’s not too terrible, but it does slow things down a lot and makes anything complex or visually precise take forever to get right. Gotta build your own or adapt to use Tiled or something.
- Weird, clunky game packaging - (but compared to Defold, what isn’t?)
- No awesome forum with constant staff and community support. :’(
@britzl - With Love 11 they added automatic batching, though I haven’t performance tested it yet. Supposedly it batches the line & shape drawing stuff too.