First I had an unsuccessful journey with GameMaker, then a lot of time spent modding Minecraft in middle school without really understanding how to code. Finally, LÖVE ended up becoming my main time-sink for most of my free time through high school, about a decade ago.

Every evening I would start a new project. Some were random game ideas, some were to study certain aspects of math (like fractals), some were just meant to be nice to look at. This is where I learned a lot about game design, and also a lot of the harder aspects of programming (after that, my college CS degree ended up being a breeze).

I was working alongside an internet friend on these. Sometimes we would collaborate on something exciting, sometimes we would work alone on something and share lots of progress updates between each other. It was a really fun time. I think LÖVE having no GUI really helped our minds to run free while we learned how powerful computers could be.

Some of my LÖVE projects I remember the most fondly:

- A gravity simulation / art canvas where ships would fly around planets and paint a trail behind them [1].

- An online multiplayer platformer roguelike with full rollback netcode that handles 150ms+ ping (this was a real challenge!) - never completed.

- An online pseudo-rhythm game where you only have one button to use and you have to work with your friends to input in the correct order while a timer keeps ticking down [2].

The last one still lives rent free in my mind. This one still gets downloads today, it's the most popular project I've been a part of. But I suspect most players don't get past the step of needing to forward ports and find 3 friends to play a short 5 minute indie game. I'm proud of the idea behind it, but I don't have a good way to turn it into a full game without ruining the core idea.

LÖVE was my tool of choice for many gamejams, it was a breeze to put together a prototype once I had gotten comfortable. Today I think I have more perspective and wish I could go back in time to see more of my 100+ prototypes to completion, instead of always finding a reason something was imperfect and not worth pursuing. Now I just don't have the same amount of energy when I get home from my software day job, I often need the time just to unwind. Lately I'm trying to push through and make gamedev a habit even if it's hard, to get back some of the joy during the days I was in love with LÖVE.

Edit: Formatting

[1] https://love2d.org/imgmirrur/aIkrkdBl.png?1

[2] https://ikroth.itch.io/boss-bashing-button-brawlers