To complete your Lua game development knowledge, you must understand how to design a full engine:

• entity management
• components
• systems
• module lifecycle
• asset management
• scripting pipelines
• performance tuning
• optimization patterns
• debugging & profiling

Lua excels as an engine scripting language due to:

• fast VM
• low memory footprint
• simple integration with C/C++
• natural data-driven design
• coroutine support
• quick iteration
• extensibility

This chapter finalizes the architecture needed for professional, scalable Lua game engines.

Modern game development relies heavily on Lua’s flexibility.
Studios consistently use a set of Lua architectural patterns to build clean, scalable, and maintainable game logic.

This chapter presents the patterns used in:

• 2D/3D indie engines
• AAA game scripting systems
• LiveOps / network games
• Modular UI systems
• Defold / Love2D / Roblox (Luau) / Cocos2d-x Lua
• Custom C++ engines with embedded Lua

We will cover:

1. Entity & component architecture (ECS-friendly)
2. Messaging & event buses
3. Timer systems & schedulers
4. Finite state machines (FSM)
5. Behavior trees (BT) in pure Lua
6. Tweening & animation patterns
7. Modular game script structure

This is the first “serious engineering” chapter in the book.