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.
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.
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?):
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.
