LÖVE vs Orx

The LÖVE forums are extremely helpful. With people checking the forums every day, it won't take long to receive answer to your questions on the Support board, receive feedback on games you post in the Projects board, as well as have a chat about the LÖVE engine while learning tricks to use in the very active General board.

If you need an immediate answer though, or just want to chat, there is a very active and helpful IRC channel.

Lua is an embeddable scripting language designed to be lightweight, fast yet powerful. It is used in major titles such as Civilization as well as a lot of indie games.

Lua is very popular because it provides "meta language" features. You can implement object-oriented structures, or pure procedural functions, etc. It has a very simple C interface, and gives the engine developer a lot of flexibility in the language itself.

Artists tend to love Lua too because it's very approachable, with plain and forgiving syntax.

Lua is free open-source software, distributed under a very liberal license (the well-known MIT license).

Lua2D handles loading the resources, reading input, playing sounds and displaying stuff on the screen. Only the logic is left for the developer to write. It also removes the overhead of having to use and learn a GUI game editor. All you need is a knowledge of Lua and your favourite text editor or IDE.

Supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android and iOS.

The LÖVE engine is licensed under The zlib/libpng License (which is very short and human readable) which allows you to use the source code and even modify it as long as you do not claim that the original source code is yours.

You can obtain the code at this bitbucket repository and even help fix bugs and participate in the development of LÖVE.

There are plenty of open source examples of games or components built by the community that are ready to use or learn from.

The LÖVE wiki provides full documentation of its easy to use Modules, which are conveniently located on the side bar of the wiki. It only takes seconds to find the module for love.keyboard, which provided a list of all functions along with arguments and examples where the function could be used.

You can learn the basics very quickly and start making simple games in no time, even if you have no previous Lua knowledge. If you're a little experienced with LÖVE, you can prototype a 2D game with it in no time.

It is possible to develop games directly on a tablet or cellphone with the Android system by using the experimental Android branch.

That is a great tool for teaching novice programmers. Creating a game on LÖVE, you have to think about developing, not about the syntax of the language.

Has several tutorials in several languages on the internet, mainly on Youtube.

Because all professionals in gamedev use C++, and Lua the fastest scripting lang.

So much love.

Powerful config system that makes orx data-driven and provides an easy to use load/save system.

Good friendly development community ready to help each other with tips and advice for setting up and best practices.

Automatic hot-loading of resources upon modification on disk, shortens drastically iteration times.

Written in C with high emphasis on memory and CPU efficiency.

Supports Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS and Android.

Orx is a Data Driven engine that greatly reduces required code. You can configure object definitions, bodies, cameras, sound, animation, event tracks, etc.

GLSL code can be added straight into data configuration files and can be applied to any texture: background or objects whivh allows for some amazing effects. All GLSL versions are supported, again by providing the shader language version in your configuration file.
Parameters are supported and values over time for shader animation.

Clock system that provides time consistency and allows time stretching + high precision timers

Color and translation FX are simple to configure and apply to objects.

Includes a chaining graph & custom animation events for synchronization.

Uses the zlib license. Lets you use Orx for free for any kind of projects, even for commercial ones.

All input devices are fully supported: Joysticks, Mouse, Gamepad, Keyboard and Touchscreen. Multiple physical devices and be mapped the same binding.

Rated the fastest engine in the OpenFL’s BunnyMark since October 2015.

Samples for sound effects, or streams for music. All sounds can be groups via audio buses just like in a typical DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).
All sounds can be spatial relative to the camera.

Camera/viewport scheme allowing multiple views displayed with camera translation, zoom and rotation.

Fragment (pixel) shader support, render to texture, MRT, easy composition and custom rendering support.

Integrated runtime profiler (with graphical display) to easily spot which parts of your game need to be optimized.

Supports .bmp, .png, .jpg, .tga and .dds

Out of the box Windows support for:

• Visual Studio
• Codelite
• CodeBlocks
• gmake

Out of the box Mac support for:

• XCode
• Codelite
• gmake

Out of the box Linux support for:

• Codelite
• CodeBlocks
• gmake

Orx provides a excellent c++ wrapper for object oriented design, called: orx/Scroll. You can, of course, roll your own.