> because I do weird things like declaring variables that are as long as a highway

Don't let people talk you out of descriptive variable names. It makes code much more readable, easier to understand, and will help when you come back to it later. We're not battling to save every bit anymore and editors have auto-complete.

Congrats on the project, I can't say much more, because GitHub locked me out for clicking between files too fast... I guess that's a thing now.

Have you seen this 2D game engine called Love? It's for Lua, and I've heard it's very good

https://love2d.org/