helium VS awesome-love2d

I wonder if something like helium that handles click detection but not rendering would still seem like overkill. Definitely beyond your bare metal goals, but might be simpler than trying to customize styling in a UI framework.

You could use a library like slab (which lets you just add buttons but may not be so straight forward to deeply customize your look) or helium (which facilitates creating a UI system for buttons, but may not be straightforward to use). I use slab for my debug UI and like it, but haven't tried it for nice-looking game UI.

I tried both and honestly the experience with love is better because it's actually made for lua. There's a vscode extension for love, a ton of lua libraries etc.

For OOP, look into metatables. I got started with Lua through Love2D and through that I found some OOP modules that are pretty helpful. Here’s a full list of them: https://github.com/love2d-community/awesome-love2d (I’ve been using classic with my projects)

Such a great Lua gamedev framework! And there's lots of libraries in GitHub. Many collected on awesome-love2d so you don't have to build everything yourself.

love2d is open source and runs on PC and phones. Someone's even ported it to Nintendo3DS/Switch homebrew. nata is the ECS I use, but you can also checkout more libraries on awesome-love2d. I really enjoy using love2d (especially if you enjoy the engine building parts), but one caveat is that major version number bumps will break compatibility. It's usually easy to port and they deprecate functions long in advance. But there's lots of old libraries out there for older versions that won't just work on the latest love2d (like the code for Harvard's CS50 course).

This is example is just the simple version, a state managers can be very powerful, some examples can be found here

I've used tiny ECS a bit, and I like it a lot. Check out this list

It depends on what you want to display that will dictate the limitations on how you can adjust to different resolutions. There are probably libraries that can help you with this.

Once you've done a few tutorials, you can start doing your own thing. Use the LÖVE Wiki (first link) to your advantage. It has the whole love API documented, and you'll probably need to have it open while you work. At this point, you can also look at this GitHub repository for a list of cool libraries that work with LÖVE.