love VS TIC-80

Tho personally I've come to prefer making my games in https://love2d.org and https://tic80.com

Start by making some games imo, unless you already have a good project in mind. https://tic80.com or https://love2d.org

If all goes well with PICO-8, you can "upgrade" to love2d, which like PICO-8 uses Lua programming language, but allows for higher resolutions, and generally more polished outcome.

I have a similar profile, and I have tried many different engines/frameworks/libraries. Some thoughts: - ebiten, written in Go, is a very light game dev lib. I like Go, so writing "my own engine" with it was pretty fun (I have some libs for ebiten here). Mostly 2d. - Love2d is sort of the same thing, but written in C++, and scriptable in Lua. I absolutely love this level of abstraction, and this is probably the one I have been the most productive with (example here). Mostly 2d, but people have done 3d with it too. - Godot has a bright future, at least from my point of view. The 2D workflow is very very fast, much faster than Unity in my experience (you don't spend time waiting for stuff to recompile every time you edit a script, for starters), and they just released v4, which comes with insane improvements in 3D rendering. I have never delved into 3D, but from what I can see, it's on par with what Unity can produce these days. Plus, the founders have created a separate commercial entity to provide support for consoles (called W4games), because the open source licensing attached to Godot is not compatible with the NDAs involved in publishing for consoles - raylib and monogame might be interesting for you if you want to go old-school. They're both inspired by the same framework (XNA) and they work similarly. Also very close to the way Love2d does things, and a comparable level of abstraction. - Unity is slow. I honestly dislike it a lot, just for this reason. There's also a lot of "we've refactored this, and there's no docs yet, but you can also use this other system, and also the legacy one, and that one, or build your own based on these primitives" and it's hard when you're a beginner. If you know what you're doing I guess it's fine, or if you don't care, but as a software engineer, you will probably be like me and try to find the "best" solution to your problem, which is tiring and hard to do with Unity.

Also, a recommendation that is a little more Niche. Lua, and love. love2d.org is a really easy to make games with a relatively simple programming language. Could be fun.

Are you saying she wants the D? Because that's a total brainfuck. I'd much rather believe they merely fell in Löve.

Being a hard worker and having persistence are more important than being intelligent; a lazy genius never accomplishes anything. Try learning programming as its own skill separate from gamedev first. If you're finding C# too difficult, than try a simpler language like Lua. Lua specifically can be used with Love2D to make games.

i read you want to make games. go for 2d games, love https://love2d.org/ or pygame https://www.pygame.org/news or some kind of js engine for webgame https://github.com/collections/javascript-game-engines

Tho personally I've come to prefer making my games in https://love2d.org and https://tic80.com

then totally go with tic80 https://tic80.com/

Start by making some games imo, unless you already have a good project in mind. https://tic80.com or https://love2d.org

TIC-80 and PICO-8 are great for making quick games and learning. the limitations encourage a smaller scope and the simplicity of the tools make it easy to collab with young children on the development itself. Making a sprite is just coloring some squares after all :) Great moment to animate their little doodle on the screen and have it controlled by their input. Would recommend the book Mindstorms on using games as educational tools, these tools fit within that view.

TIC-80 (free)

Since you're comfortable with Javascript, then tic-80 can be an alternative. https://tic80.com/ But pico-8 has more resources. I also enjoyed the tutorials in the Get Coding books. https://getcodingkids.com/

If you're _totally_ new to game programming (like me), I found tic80 [0] or pico8 [1] (I think the latter is more popular) a really nice introduction to game programming. They are simulated "fantasy consoles" that come with a whole wack constraints, so you're somewhat limited in what you can build, but it leaves a lot of room to grok core concepts that you could then take over to Unity or Unreal or the like.

There is a third one too, I can't remember what it's called though. I think it has "Love" in the name.

[0] https://tic80.com/

[1] https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

I'm gonna echo the suggestion to make a video game; if you're a person who likes games this is by far the best way to go. Obviously love2d is brilliant but you might also take a look at https://tic80.com which is a little more all-in-one and easier to learn.

This is a sample code for learning, written in Moonscript for TIC-80:

TIC-80: None