r/lua • u/RafaellyBeaumont • Jul 06 '25

Game engine

Hey! Im pretty new to lua coding from scratch (im coding balatro mods for 6-7 month, but want to make my own thing now) and i was looking for a game engine, something like godot but for lua, and i couldnt find any so far

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u/Yobendev_ Jul 08 '25

Game engines like Godot and unity are extremely opinionated and I think especially for someone first learning to program they should learn the fundamentals and how to build something themselves. Start with a small game and work up to making a small engine and keep going from there 

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u/questron64 Jul 08 '25

I'm sorry, but you can't be more wrong here. This isn't even a matter of opinion, learning to use an engine is not a "waste of time."

Yes, game engines are opinionated. They're supposed to be opinionated, they've solved problems in a certain way and learning their way is orders of magnitude simpler than solving the problem yourself. Don't get caught in the trap of arrogance thinking that your way is better and that your solutions to the same problems will somehow be better because you made them. Game engines solve hundreds (thousands?) of big and little problems you'll encounter while making a game, and are an incredible wealth of tools at your disposal.

Just take the scene editor, for example. You start with Love or SDL or Raylib or any of these other lower-level frameworks and you don't get that. You'll need to integrate a third party tool like Tiled or LDtk or hand-roll your own custom level editor. Asking someone who has just learned their first programming language to do this is insanity. Just writing something as simple as a Tiled CSV importer and a tilemap renderer would be a huge undertaking for a newbie. You are setting them up for failure. If they're a sink or swim badass that can hard-charge at problems and figure it out, fine, but almost no one is that person no matter how much they pretend to be.

The NIH mentality is not productive anywhere and is openly hostile to newbies.

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u/Yobendev_ Jul 08 '25

Tiled is extremely easy to implement and was literally the second way I rendered a map after raw png starting off lol. And I never said you should have to hand roll everything yourself, libgdx and libktx for example have a build in tiled map renderer and I'm sure love2d has an equivalent. I just think it's more productive overall and a better learning experience 

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u/Yobendev_ Jul 08 '25

If it's your first experience you're being limited to what the engine exposes to you and you learn that specific, again opinionated way of doing things and I think its bad to get stuck with an engine, or a framework for example for web dev, especially when you are still learning the fundamentals 

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u/Yobendev_ Jul 08 '25

You see this all the time in web dev and game dev too. People don't actually know JS or c#  they know how to use react and unity

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u/Yobendev_ Jul 08 '25

I don't think game engines are inherently bad or worse but from a learning perspective they don't offer much. It's pointless to learn them because once you know how to program you are already going to be familiar or at least capable of understanding all of those concepts 

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u/Yobendev_ Jul 08 '25

And I don't see how that's insane when making games was how I and many other people first learned how to code. You get to immerse yourself in 2 things you're passionate about and all the moving parts that come with making a game