For me, one of the things that eat up an unnecessary amount of time during each LD is reinventing the wheel of all sorts of functionality. Things such as camera behaviour, tweening, timers, etc. I make games using the LĂVE framework, since I love Lua and the framework itself is great. However, it won’t give you all the same tools as Unity for example.
This is why I’ve been working on building my own framework on top of LĂVE to drive my LD entries, dubbed Conclavus (github). It integrates a lot of useful tools from the LĂVE community (such as a gui library, easy particle creation tools, file hotswapping and a browser debug interface), while adding a whole range of other game-agnostic functionality. It should fit within the LD compo rules, which is why I’m making this post. My framework can be forked by anyone who wants to mess around with it, though mind it has been mostly untested. I’ll probably spend some time during LD debugging my framework đ