When comparing LÖVE vs Monkey X, the Slant community recommends LÖVE for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” LÖVE is ranked 3rd while Monkey X is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose LÖVE is:
The [LÖVE forums][1] 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][2]. [1]: https://www.love2d.org/forums/ [2]: http://webchat.oftc.net/?channels=love
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Active and very friendly community
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.
Pro Uses the fantastic Lua for scripting
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).
Pro Easy to understand and use
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.
Pro Cross-platform
Supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android and iOS.
Pro Open source and free
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.
Pro Many examples and libraries with source code
There are plenty of open source examples of games or components built by the community that are ready to use or learn from.
Pro Very good documentation
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.
Pro Great for prototyping
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.
Pro Can develop within Android
It is possible to develop games directly on a tablet or cellphone with the Android system by using the experimental Android branch.
Pro Very good for education
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.
Pro Many tutorials on the internet
Has several tutorials in several languages on the internet, mainly on Youtube.
Pro C++ and Lua one of the best languages for gamedev
Because all professionals in gamedev use C++, and Lua the fastest scripting lang.
Pro Cute name
So much love.
Pro Native code support
Developers can make native calls directly from Monkey code. This allows access to any native functionality and platform-specific features.
Pro Native module support
You are not restricted only to the modules you get from the official release. You can build your own stuff. Even build your own "app" module. It feels limitless. In comparison with other cross platform solutions, you actually get the translated source code and you can play with it if you want.
Pro Built-in modules for quickly building games
Monkey X has a selection of great built-in modules.
- Graphics
- Audio
- Input
- Data and Filesystems
- Networking
- Math
- Text and Strings
- Collections
- Online Services
Pro You can create custom targets
The language gives you the possibility to build your own targets. You are not limited to the targets officially supported.
Pro Low cost license fee
All target platforms for a fair one off license fee.
Pro Easy to learn
With it's Object orientation and clean syntax its a brilliant language to learn if you have never done any programming before and yet still has all the power it needs to make full games and apps.
Pro Uses a great, easy to learn language
Monkey X uses a custom programming language (called Monkey) for all its scripting needs. Monkey is rather easy to learn, it's object-oriented which will help most programmers with understanding it. It's also statically typed and uses a garbage collector, helping to avoid manual memory management.
Pro Partly open-source
The entirety of the base-language itself is open source. Commercial modules such as Mojo for non-free platforms cost a one-time fee. Though Mojo is not free for all targets, the targets for these platforms are, meaning it is possible to implement other frameworks for these targets.
The Desktop (GLFW and C++ based) and HTML5 implementations of Mojo are currently free and open source.
The language's development is completely public, and is managed via GitHub.
Pro Free HTML5 and Desktop (GLFW) target platform
The free version of Monkey X lets you compile to HTML5 or Desktop (GLFW). Other platforms such as iOS, Android (and OUYA), XNA, Flash and Windows 8 (Phone) require the paid version of Monkey X Pro.
Pro Cross-platform
Monkey X is a cross-platform game engine. It allows developers to run the same code on multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Flash, Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
The development environment supports Windows, OS X, and Linux.
Pro Not running in its own VM
Unlike other multi-platform engines (Unity3D, Corona, etc), Monkey-X games do not run explicitly in their own virtual machines. Your code is translated into the native languages of each target platform, and then compiled as a native executable. However, just as native games, on platforms such as Android (Currently), and HTML5, games will be ran through the targeted platform's usual VM(s). That being said, you won't be dealing with a proprietary virtual machine, so you won't experience any real overhead when compared to a native game.
Pro Made by the Mark Sibly Factor
The Mark Sibly Factor denotes that a programming language will be easy to learn, fun to learn and allow any age group ( within Cognitive Reason ) to program games and great games. The Mark Sibly Factor denotes also that the games programming language you purchase will be backed by decades of compiler programming experience, game making tool programming and finally a Game Programming Language that kicks Ass.
Pro Free for commercial releases
With the free version of Monkey you are still able to create commercial HTML5 and Desktop games.
Pro Many community modules available
The community has created essential modules:
- Spine for animations
- Box2D and Chipmunk for physics
- Game frameworks such as Ignition, fantomEngine, and Flixel
- Diddy for lots of extra functionality
- FontMachine for custom bitmap fonts
- MiniB3D for 3D gaming
- And several others...
Pro Drawing Commands
Drawing commands are easier to read and edit than is manipulating scene graphs. You can immediately see in your code what's going to be drawn and in what order. Transformations are a no-brainer too.
Pro Lots of great examples
Monkey X includes over 50 examples ranging from complete sample games to demos of single features.
Pro Object oriented programming
MonkeyX is an object-oriented dialect of BASIC that's easy, clean and powerful.
Cons
Con Not very powerful
The engine has very few modules and only the really required one, you'll have to do almost everything from scratch.
Con Game distribution is harder than it should
The process to create an executable could be streamlined: the dedicated wiki page is somewhat confusing, and the actual process either means relying on one of the various community-maintained tools or creating an executable manually for each platform.
Con More of an API than a game engine
It may come with graphical, audio and IO but it lack most features most game engines have such as UI system, pathfinding, etc. and you have to implement most of the stuff you might want manually.
Con Only for the very simple games
Con Documentation is very dry and technical
The site has plenty of tutorials, true, but they all read very technical, and explain very little. This might be too much for beginners, even for coding purposes, because of the fact that the specifics aren't explained well enough to learn effectively. The docs can be found frustrating to understand even the basics, such as tables or the like, because of how poorly they are explained, and how few examples are given before expecting you to be able to use them.
Con Game distribution for Android is a pain in the Arse
It is like you're doing a science experiment.
Con HTML5 support
Depends on love.js for HTML5 distribution which is old and incompatible with current Emscripten / LLVM version.
Con Absolutely no GUI (no graphical interface)
This has no graphical interface at all, you have to know how to read script in order to know what you're looking at. After you've written the script for everything, you compile it to see the result. It's a very poor way to create a game, given how even most professional tools out there give you a GUI to work with and debug on the go. The lack of a GUI slows down the work by ten-fold, and it's just an inefficient use of your time.
Con The community seems juvenile
For example, some of the library include names such as HUMP, LUBE, AnAL.
Con You'll have to learn a new programming language
Even though Monkey is rather easy to learn and borrows a lot of concepts from more popular languages, having to learn a new language develop games is a lot of friction for people that already know how to program in other languages..
Con The documentation is not very thorough
The documentation contains a reasonably detailed language overview, and a somewhat-generated list of the included modules, classes, and methods. Module descriptions are rather lax, but usually present. Method descriptions tend to be short, and a majority of them contain no usage snippets; most parameters have very minimal descriptions. And there are no community collaboration features to help improve it, besides GitHub.
Con The included IDE is poor
Although better IDE'S are availabe for a price, the default one is bare bones and lacks functionality
Con No real asset store
Untangling how to keep assets in the ".data" requires attention and a filenaming convention.
Con limited OS export targets with free version
Free version only targets Desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux) and HTML5, not mobile.