Lua metatables and a week of shmup logic

Metatables are where the real complexity starts in Lua, and honestly, that's where I spent most of my week trying to figure out if I actually understood the underlying memory model or if I was just hallucinating logic that worked by accident. I’ve been tinkering with Python, JS, and Go since I was twelve, but switching to Lua felt different, more granular. I ended up building this small shoot 'em up called "SPACE CONQUEROR" as a stress test for my own implementation of the logic, because you can't really tell if you've mastered the syntax until you try to make something move on a screen without the whole state machine collapsing. I didn't go the traditional OOP route because Lua's object model is fundamentally different, so I had to lean heavily into metatables to handle the behavior, which is a rabbit hole of its own. I'll admit I used AI to refactor my variable naming conventions—I have a tendency toward being overly verbose in my identifiers—and I definitely pulled some snippets for the heavier math functions because reinventing the wheel is a quick way to burn out. There’s a lot of talk about how projects like this are "rite of passage" moments, and I even noticed the mechanics mirror "Blastar," which is what Elon Musk reportedly coded as a kid, but I'm more interested in the technical execution than the nostalgia. I'm not claiming to be some prodigy here, and the imposter syndrome hits hard when you realize how much you don't know about low-level optimization, but the project is live and I'm looking for actual technical critiques rather than just "good job" comments. If you want to look at the actual implementation and see how I handled the logic:

https://github.com/nzukoudamien/Space-Conqueror