rust-mini-games VS love

I personally like to make small video games, and I use the game as an excuse to learn some other technology by incorporating it. I've been doing this to learn Rust [0].

If you want to do something similar, I have a huge list of video game ideas you can pull from [1].

[0] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/rust-mini-games/tree/main/2d-gam...

[1] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/four-emoji-concepts

Related: If anyone is interested, I've been working on an ECS based mini-game framework in Rust [0] that runs with this idea. It has a 1200 hz simulation clock, 60 hz rendering clock, and 150 hz physics integrator (Euler). I've also posted some example mini-games that use it [1].

[0] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/mgfw

[1] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/rust-mini-games/tree/main/2d-gam...

Tangentially related - if anyone is new to Rust and wants to see some simple mini text game examples, I've been working on a bunch [0]. It also includes some more complicated text games:

Asylum - Choose your own adventure style interactive narrative

Knights and Barbarians - Simple turned based strategy game

Legend of the Rusty Dragon - Simple adventure game inspired by Legend of the Red Dragon

[0] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/rust-mini-games

I've built a few games with my son over the years. The fun part for us was all about fast iteration, and then laughing at the bugs together.

There are some other recommendations here for how to approach 3d, and he is specifically asking for 3d -- but I want to put in one more pitch for 2d: the fun-to-tedium ratio can be much higher.

I wonder if you could spend some time prototyping some of his ideas in LÖVE https://love2d.org/ -- if you show him the smallest sketch of something working, he might have an idea about what to add next.

Many years ago, on a flight, we went from 0 to game before we landed (with no experience).

* When a cell is born it randomly takes on the color of one of its (3) parents.

To try it out:

1. Install LÖVE for your device from https://love2d.org (~5MB and open source). (iOS requires building from source on a Mac, or installing the third-party Love2D Studio: https://love2d-studio.marknoteapp.com)

2. Install my Lua Carousel from https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel (~100KB). It includes all its source code and can be edited live on a computer as it runs.

3. Copy the ~100 lines of code from the bottom of https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog/651711/new-version-after-9-days and paste them into Lua Carousel.

Probably the most important piece of software we'll be playing around with is a game engine called LÖVE. Lua is well known around developer circles as being a good scripting language when it comes to making games, and this engine is one of the more popular. I'll be going through installation at the end of this post.

I got it – these are the steps I took:

1. Download Love from https://love2d.org/

libGDX is great, but I can understand if it's not for some people. This also applies to love2d, raylib and Monogame

You don't need to use git if you don't want to. Try downloading the 0.10.2 source directly here (the file you want is love-0.10.2-linux-src.tar.gz); I see you've tried this already but try again just to see what happens. Extract it to a directory (e.g. love-0.10.2-linux-src) and then run:

Love2d (MIT/C++/Lua) https://github.com/love2d/love

- Löve (doesn't have a separate page, but showcases a few games at the bottom of the page): https://love2d.org

The game, Wasp Escape, was built using the open-source Löve 2D game library for Lua.

love2d (lua) is a productive, fun, good docs, and most importantly proven / field-tested 2d game library, with easy to learn fast to compile and fast to run language - lua. while lua might not have a lot of features as python, the big bonus is that its much more focused language, which is important because otherwise you can get easily distracted on bells and whistles that other programming languages provide, i know that from experience