LÖVE vs Godot

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.

Godot has a mature 2D engine with many features used by modern 2D games.

The executable is portable and less than 40 MB in size.

This engine barely released one year ago has more than 1000 forks on github and about 100 developers. Not only that just a bit of browsing trough issues you will quickly find out the dev community loves new esp free technology and does not shy away from completely rewriting parts of the engine. The audio engine is being completely rewritten to use threads and so forth.

Non-programmers (musicians, artists, etc) can join the development easily.

You can run Godot on all 3 major operating systems (Windows/Mac/Linux) and build your game to all available platforms from each without any platform-specific work needed. All platforms including Linux are supported first class.

Godot is licensed under MIT license. Anyone can grab the source from here, and compile the engine themselves.

Officially, Godot supported languages for now will be GDScript, C#(Mono), VisualScript and C++.

Many parts of the editor allow you to drag & drop, which makes working with assets and scene trees a joy.

Deploy games to desktops (Windows/OS X/Linux), smartphones (iOS/Android/BlackBerry), and the web (HTML5 via Emscripten).

Every property can be animated.

Add physics to 2D and 3D scenes, through rigid and static bodies, characters, raycasts, vehicles and more.

All the game development work is done inside one program: the engine editor. The scripting is done in the same program. No need for Eclipse or other front-end editors.

The node and the instancing concept work very well and helps developers to structure content efficiently.

An important aspect that can't be grasped without using the engine for a few days. The Interface is evolving nicely and making games is just fun.

You can change the language shown in menus. Godot translations can be found here.

Godot has their own scripting language called GDScript. The scripting language is easy to learn with Python-like syntax, but it is not Python. It's very powerful, easy to learn, and it's free of unnecessary things because it was custom built for optimized integration with the Godot Engine.

It can be used to add custom behaviors to any object by extending it with scripting, using the built-in editor with syntax highlighting and code completion.

A built-in debugger with breakpoints and stepping can be used and graphs for possible bottlenecks can be checked.

The community is great and really cares about the engine. It is easy to get help and to be part of Godot's future.

Godot Engine is itself a Godot game. By adding the "tool" keyword to the top of a script, you can design extensions for the editor itself INSIDE the editor. Integrating these editor scripts into a bundled plugin for sharing is extremely easy to do.

The engine is build not only to support version control but to really use it. Scene files for example which usually get compiled into some sort of unreadable data stay in a text format - that way you can actually see your changes in a version control system like Git.

Godot is very portable, you can download the file from a website then put it on a USB and run it on your other computer without any troublesome errors.

With 3.0's addition of NativeScript and PluginScript via GDNative, developers can easily define bindings for new scripting languages. In addition to the primarily supported C++, GDScript, VisualScript, and C# languages, the community has contributed D, Nim, and Python as well with more on the way.

The documentation used to be weak, but now we have nathen with his help the documentation is the strongest advantage.

Godot gives you the ability to create scenes to make your life easier, with reusable objects and things you want to incorporate in your games. This makes the game making processvery streamlined and organized.

The editor has a fully searchable index of class API documentation for everything the engine offers (NOT just a web interface). You can easily open the documentation for any class by Ctrl-clicking the class's name in the in-engine text editor for scripts.

The engine's source code is easy to read and understand with a self-documenting approach to code design. You don't have to wait months or years for other people to fix an engine bug that is important to your game. Often times, you can spend an hour or two of your own time to fix whatever problems you encounter yourself.

No need to learn anything with node, you can build a game without typing a line of code + has visual scripting.

There is no royalty and the game you made + engine itself is yours.

You can easily install Godot via the Steam store.

In addition to the scene editor and the script editor (with debugger), the engine also provides a tile map editor, an animation editor (not just for rigs), a performance monitor, a network profiler, and an audio bus console.

It has a great visual scripting tool. It's a great choice if you don't like to code. This was however removed in Godot 4, so you will need to use the (still supported) Godot 3 branch for visual scripting.