Love2d is so satisfying... I worked in game maker for years, and I think I was unnecessarily intimidated by "real" game programming. If you're used to something like game maker, a lighter weight framework can be basically the same thing, just with some extra steps. Instead of letting game maker handle collision, I write a little collision function/loop (for my games it's like ten lines of code). Instead of using game maker's built-in level editor, I use Ogmo to generate a JSON file (containing the tile and entity placements), then use a simple library I downloaded to turn that file into a Lua table, then write a function to draw everything on the screen.
It's a little scary at first, but it's just ultimately not that much harder. All the hard creative stuff, level design, storytelling, sound direction, etc., that's all stuff I already had to do in game maker. Working in Love2d is the same, it just takes some extra time to get the initial prototype up and running.
And none of this is unique to Love2d. If I want to try out Haxe/Heaps, or Raylib, or any other number of frameworks/lightweight game dev environments, nearly everything I've learned in Love is transferable. I don't feel beholden to any one environment anymore, which is really freeing.
Game Maker is only going to get more restrictive and shitty with its licensing. It's scary to think that someday I won't be able to get my GMS1.4 license running on a new machine and I'll be completely locked out of my old project files (unless I want to mess around with cracked versions of course, which aren't going to get easier to find as GMS1.4 gets older and older). Working with FOSS like Love2d and Ogmo (or any of the Haxe frameworks, Raylib, SDL, etc.) helps me feel safe from getting fucked over by uncaring corps like Yoyogames and Unity and Epic. I think gamedevs are becoming increasingly aware of the value of that lately.
sharing mostly for myself because a quick glance tells me you can actually deploy to HTML5 which is usually the thing that makes me avoid branching out.
Gonna reblog in addition to commenting. Yeah, if you use love.js you can export love projects to emscripten and play them in browser without TOO many headaches. Getting an actual game made in Love2d was honestly pretty easy and frictionless, the only annoying headache I dealt with was getting all the desktop exports and the web export working. Here's the tools I ultimately used:
love.js for the web export: https://github.com/Davidobot/love.js
makelove for the desktop exports: https://github.com/pfirsich/makelove
Makelove says it can export to web too, but I didn't find it reliable, I had much better luck exporting using love.js directly. Fair warning, for convoluted cookie reasons emscripten seems to error out when viewed in private browsing windows on itch.io -- I just put a little warning on the page.