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Comment by freilanzer | Hacker News Reader

MoveOrDie and Acro were made with Löve and Lua. Does anyone know if I can make a 2d game with fennel alone, without touching Lua? Alternatively, what would be a better choice for simple 2d graphics (Python would be preferred)? I want to experiment with something like Dwarf Fortress.

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Depending on your preferred workflow you would typically have a tiny loader stub in a .lua file that you never need to touch and all of your code in Fennel. You can still add third party Lua libraries if you desire and seamlessly call back and forth between these and your Fennel code. You can even have a live REPL to eval code in your running Löve session.

Lua is a very simple language. If you're coming from Python, it's probably even quicker to learn vanilla Lua (and Löve) than using something like Moonscript or fennel.

If you're set on Python there is PyGame. I haven't touched it for a number of years but back then it seemed less polished and waaay less performant than Löve.

>what would be a better choice for simple 2d graphics (Python would be preferred)? I want to experiment with something like Dwarf Fortress.

If you want to experiment with something like Dwarf Fortress, you don't need 2d graphics. You can just start with ASCII-graphics like Dwarf Fortress did.

True, but at some point I need to integrate graphics, so I don't think it's a bad idea to have simple tile graphics in place. Also, I would need some kind of inventory, text fields, etc. and they might be much easier with a framework that supports them - as you see, I have next to no experience in this area.

Yeah, I think most of the games in the Lisp Game Jam are made with Fennel and Love. The game jam is cohosted by technomancy, the maintainer of Fennel.

https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2024

You'll always need to deal with a bit of Lua afaik. If you like fantasy consoles, you can use TIC-80[1] to not have to deal with any Lua.

[1] https://tic80.com/

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