To the OP, try DragonRuby for your next game if you miss hot reloading but like the scripting, code-first nature of LÖVE. It’s also cross-platform. Not sponsored, just a big fan and it scratches many of the same itches as you described with LÖVE.
Something else to consider is traction, if you get stuck in DragonRuby there's probably not a huge amount of docs/tutorials around it. That being said, it does seem like they have a pretty active Discord at least.
Yes, but check out: https://docs.dragonruby.org/#/misc/faq?id=dragonruby-is-not-...
And
https://docs.dragonruby.org/#/misc/faq?id=what-if-i-build-so...
> If you get stuck in DragonRuby there’s probably not a huge amount of docs/tutorials around it.
You’d be surprised. The docs are extensive and there are sample games galore in the distro. https://docs.dragonruby.org/#/
Also the Discord is incredibly helpful and the creators chime in regularly.
It’s a pretty special engine and community IMO
That said, we can always use more game engines / frameworks!
This looks like an up-to-date introduction:
https://itch.io/jam/love2d-jam-2024/topic/3484009/getting-st...
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?):
https://sr.ht/~benthor/absolutely-minimal-love2d-fennel/
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.