Alright, let’s talk about this thing called loé, or maybe it’s LÖVE? The 2D engine thing. Heard some chatter about it, people saying it’s simple, good for quick projects. I had this little game idea bouncing around my head for a while, nothing huge, so I thought, why not give this loé thing a try? See what the fuss is about.
So, first step, I went looking for it. Found the download, grabbed the version for my machine. It was pretty painless, I gotta say. No giant installer asking a million questions. Just a zip file, basically. Unpack it, and you’re sort of ready to go. I liked that simplicity upfront. Felt old-school, in a good way.
Then I actually started trying to make something. Fired up my text editor. Now, this thing uses Lua. Okay, Lua. Haven’t messed with that in a long, long time. Felt a bit alien compared to the C# or Java I stare at all day. Took me a bit to get back into the groove, remembering how tables work and all that syntax weirdness. I poked around the examples they give you. Got a blank window showing up pretty quick. Then I managed to draw a shape on the screen. Felt like a win, you know? Baby steps.
Getting into the Weeds
Putting a circle on the screen is one thing, making a game is another. I wanted to get a character moving, responding to keys. Found some tutorials, cobbled together some code. Got my little guy moving left and right. Okay, progress. But then I hit the stuff that always gets tricky. Collision detection. How do things bump into each other properly?
That’s where it got a bit… murky. I started searching online. How do people handle physics or collisions in loé? And man, it seemed like there wasn’t one clear answer. Found a bunch of different libraries people had written. Some looked okay, some looked abandoned. Some folks just wrote their own basic stuff. It felt fragmented. You had to kind of pick your poison and hope for the best. The main documentation for loé itself was fine for the basic functions, but when you needed something more complex, it felt like digging through old forum posts and hoping someone else had solved your exact problem five years ago.
It reminded me a lot of how some open-source projects go. The core idea is neat, simple even. But the ecosystem around it? It’s the wild west. Makes you appreciate the big, clunky engines sometimes, even with all their bloat. At least they usually have a standard way of doing common things.
Déjà Vu All Over Again
This whole experience felt familiar. Like this one gig I had years ago. We were building this internal tool. The boss got sold on some fancy new framework. Super lightweight! Blazing fast! Yeah, it was fast, until we tried to actually build the features we needed. No decent UI components. Database integration was flaky. We spent more time fighting the framework, writing basic stuff that should have been built-in, than actually building the tool. Ended up patching it with bits from other libraries. Became a real headache to maintain.
You see this pattern everywhere. A tool is great for its niche. LÖVE/loé seems awesome for game jams, prototypes, learning. Quick to get started, not much ceremony. But for something you plan to maintain and expand? That lack of strong conventions, the fragmented libraries… it starts to add up. You worry you’ll paint yourself into a corner or spend ages reinventing the wheel.
It’s like those companies that jump on Go for everything. Yeah, Go is cool for APIs. But then they try to build everything with it and realize it doesn’t have good libraries for UI, or complex data analysis, or whatever. So they start bolting on Python scripts, Java services… suddenly their simple Go backend is just one piece of a chaotic puzzle. Maintaining that? Good luck.
So, What Happened?
Where did I land with loé? Well, I did get my little character moving. Added some basic collision. It worked, kinda. But looking ahead, thinking about menus, saving progress, handling different screen resolutions… I just saw a lot of wheel-reinventing in my future. The initial simplicity started to feel like it might cost more time down the road.
So, I shelved it for now. The project, I mean. I spent a few evenings on it, learned a bit, refreshed my Lua (which was… an experience). Maybe I’ll use loé for a super quick weekend project sometime. But for that slightly bigger idea I had? Nah. I think I’ll stick with something more batteries-included, even if it means a slightly heavier start. Sometimes the well-trodden path is less stressful, you know? That’s my two cents on trying out loé.
