Obviously you can do what you like, but I'd advise making sure box2d (or similar) is super easy. Bonus points if there is also a built in function for drawing box2d objects.

I've often taught beginning game dev in a day, and with box2d in love2d you can very quickly make a wide selection of cool games, and while it's not perfect it makes it easy to get started making platforms, doing collisions, all sorts of things.

That's my idea stack as well (I tried to build something like SDL2 + V8 at some point but ended up giving up...) If you have a repo/website set up please leave a link for me to follow :)

... at least if I can get the simplest Visual Studio + CMake + vcpkg hello world working.

Which I can't.

This always happens every few years. It takes me about a week to get a C++ program compiling and running, and by the end of it, I've lost all motivation, forget how any of it works, and delete it all and move back to TypeScript/web stuff. At least that I know despite all its warts.

[edit] figured it out

Hello me from the future, googling this in a few years. It's actually really simple: just follow the same steps on that page you were on[1] except you HAVE TO run the `vcpkg new --application` and `vcpkg add port fmt` commands in the dev cmd prompt, you can't just add the file manually for some reason, even though that's all it seems like it's doing.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcpkg/get_started/get-star...