There is no fancy wording here. Take the first line from wikipedia "a memory leak is a type of resource leak that occurs when a computer program incorrectly manages memory allocations[1] in a way that memory which is no longer needed is not released." Which i read as a clear black and whit...

This is the very definition of a memory leak.
And of course its not anymore if you call garbage collect, i mean.... thats the point.
What are you trying to say here?

This is already cooler than 90% of what you find in comercial pool games for old consoles.

The problem here is that this kind of game is all about physics, you gotta have to nail it or else its garbage.
So pool is not the smartest starting point to get into game dev.

Practical example for a memory leak: Have a textbox, have it have a zoom in/out function. We reload our font with Font = love.graphics.newFont( zoom) _Font_ is overwriten each time so logically we would assume the old font data is discardet as it is no longer referenced. This is not the case because...

Somewhere in this player:draw mess you call either translate or scale which of course makes all following positions incorrect.

Thats a broad question and largely depends on what type of game, how many objects are on the screen or even how many pixels the game has. Losely there are 3 approaches to this: Mapping based - Where the entire viewable area is mapped to a table, that means around 10-100 pixel are grouped together as...

Putting this in the touchpress callback looks like an error to me.
Put this in the update loop instead.

+1 is the the only math most games need.

That .love is packaged incorrectly. I see no fading at all here and i am not sure what exactly you need. But you dont need to have multiple canvases for it. If you just want a fading trail then the smartest solution is to have a table full of positions that you just prepend (table insert) the curren...

Löve has a better performance than anything else i am aware of.