LÖVE vs Starling

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.

Starling is just 12k lines of code and doesn't try to do everything — but what it does, as efficient as possible.

With Feathers, you can easily add great user interfaces to your games — or even create business apps with Starling.

Starling is available for free with code available on GitHub.

Forum is always active with knowledgeable developers and with lot of inside info, and post mortems.

With UI, you can design it in Flash Professional (powerful 2D editor), export to swf file, use GAF convert swf file to gaf file, finnally, load gaf file to Starling. GAF can convert a lot of file swf to one atlas. Alway use same resource in design files (fla) to optimize atlas size, avoid duplicate asset in atlas.

You can use flash to create animation for starling.

Let the GPU do the rendering, the CPU has more important tasks to do.

It can be exported to web flash player, iOS, Android, Windows, and OS X

Using AIR's native extensions any native code that can be written can be run and used by the game engine.

New features are added regularly.

Starling can run more animated display objects than Unity2D and many others frameworks at 60 fps.