I have used love2d for a lot of small projects and highly regard it (and absolutely LOVE its community. Personally love2d & Rust have been the most helpful communities I have ever interacted with). But it is NOT a unity replacement. Not even for 2d. Its a framework and not an engine. which means that you have a core engine and there are some community libraries in various states of completion/support that you can use. Else you end up doing everything by yourself.

Let's say, you want to do UI, then there are 4-5 options ahead of you and you will no know how well these libraries are maintained till you use them. Very likely you wil find yourself mucking about the code of these libraries to fix weird bugs or adding a feature your game needs.

So, great for prototyping and learning about game dev. But not something I recommend for actual projects with dates.

Overall IMO, the closest to Unity alternative I can recommend are;

1. Godot 2. Defold 3. Gdevelop (HTML based. No-code development, which can make people love or hate it) 4. CTjs

If you are ok with paying for the gamedev - Gamemaker is another solid choice.

Each of these have their pros and cans, but are full fledged engines with huge communities and helpful resources to go with them.

And if an editor free engine is what you are looking for , Raylib would be highly recommended.

My personal requirements would be;

* 2d focused * huge community with tutorials & documentation for everything * libraries & extensions for all the usual gamedev stuff like camera, lighting etc. * asset protection baked in * console & mobile export targets. * Steam integration

Personally, I am personally leaning heavily towards Raylib using zig bindings - with Gdevelop/CTjs for quick prototyping of ideas.

I have tried Rust engines like Bevy, but the Rust tax was too heavy for me and I personally could not proceed beyond simple projects. your mileage may vary. Fyrox is good too, but there are pretty much no tutorials out there.

Another dark horse you can consider is the Flame engine on Flutter. Its very feature complete and you get all the mobile niceties for free. it has a nice community but examples, documentation tutorials etc are non existent.

Finally, if wishes come true, i'd really like a native version of the Phaser engine which will allow me to code in typescript, have all the existing Phaser features/apis, let me leverage its huge tutorials/resources, generate native binaries, enable baking in assets etc- but we don't have anything like that yet -_-