11 ms·

LÖVE: a framework to make 2D games in Lua

556 points by rapnie 3y ago

yetihehe 3y ago
For some giggling, look at names of libraries: https://love2d.org/wiki/Category:Libraries https://love2d.org/wiki/Category:Libraries - Möan.lua - A messagebox system with multiple-choices and more (renamed to Talkies) - Gspöt - GUI library for Love ...
- evertedsphere 3y ago
  >"Lily" and "yaoui" on successive lines
- chii 3y ago
  Nothing wrong with a good naming scheme.
  - GhostWhisperer 3y ago
    until you want to teach gamedev to kids
    - worble 3y ago
      Kids can enjoy dirty jokes too
      - GhostWhisperer 3y ago
        it's obvious you don't have kids, or have ever been in a position of tutoring someone else's kids
        yetihehe 3y ago
        Some children really enjoy dirty jokes, it's typically adults who react negatively to dirty jokes from kids.
        fileeditview 3y ago
        Children will be totally distracted by things like that. Instead of concentrating on the actual task/goal they will focus on funny/silly words and this is not helping in teaching them something.
- dxuh 3y ago
  There was a time when this was really popular, but most of the löve community has abandoned this to be more accessible to kids and just to look less infantile. I think those names are mostly frowned upon now and many of the popular libs have been in fact renamed.
  - nunodonato 3y ago
    I was from that time. So many giggles with the names people would come up with :D
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
alainchabat 3y ago
wanted to kudo for the refreshing design
V__ 3y ago
This week has to be Christmas for people who developed an engine not named Unity.
- maccard 3y ago
  I'm a big fan of love2d, but for _almost everyone_ it's not a replacement for unity. Looking at https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Love2D/ https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Love2D/, there's only two games on that list that (based on steamspy numbers) that would actually be affected by the recent pricing changes. If you're objecting to Unity on moral grounds for it's new DRM philosophies, or it's CEO, well those were just as valid almost 10 years ago.
  - throwawee 3y ago
    Yeah. I've had fun with Love2D but it's not even an engine, really. It mostly just wraps SDL functions (and a few other libraries). If that fits your use case exactly, go for it! But if you're looking for the FOSS equivalent of Unity, Godot is pretty much exactly that.
- raincole 3y ago
  Love2D has been there forever. It's not a replacement for Unity. The only open source project that remotely resembles Unity is Godot.
  - raincole 3y ago
    I forgot Stride: https://www.stride3d.net https://www.stride3d.net It was not completely open source, but it is now (if I didn't read it wrong).
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Well, a lot of what people make with Unity could be done perfectly well with Löve. It's not intended to replace the Unity target public, but Unity is used well beyond its target public.
- progbits 3y ago
jay_kyburz 3y ago
I'm a huge fan of Love and have many side projects on the go. I quite like Lua although it took some getting used to. You would have to be fairly disciplined to work on a big game with multiple programmers. The c# of Unity means you can be fairly lazy rely on the IDE to help you work out what is going on. I imagine you could make a real mess with Lua. It's much better than Godot and Love is a really solid foundation to build your game on.
- TheRoque 3y ago
  Well, godot does 3D as well as 2D and has a fully-fledged GUI editor, so I don't get the comparison and in what regards Love is "better".
  - sim7c00 3y ago
    For games which do not require a level editor i'd agree love is better. but this is only a small subset of games perhaps. other cases, an editor is definitely useful. making an editor yourself is really, really tedious.
  - jay_kyburz 3y ago
    I spent a few months working on Godot and it was clear that the developers don't actually make games, and don't have the same priorities as me. I want a real solid foundation to build on. Nobody likes to put down such a great looking open source project, but I decided it was not for me.
    - TheRoque 3y ago
      I am curious what issues you ran into. Also, there are about 50 games per year released with Godot on steam, so there are definitely people pulling it off
      - jay_kyburz 3y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27624646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27624646
boffinAudio 3y ago
Speaking of Lua based Game Engines, I wish MOAI had managed to survive the onslaught of App-store policies designed to kill it. It was a really fun way to build apps. I wonder if anyone has ported Hanappe, which is a GUI framework on top of MOAI, to LOVE yet ... https://github.com/makotok/Hanappe https://github.com/makotok/Hanappe Maybe its time to revive MOAI and bring some heat to these frameworks ..
nathias 3y ago
I really love that love has no gui, every other game framwork I tried is 1000s of stacked gui windows...
- rollcat 3y ago
  Löve is more of a library/framework than a full engine. It's a whole layer of the stack below what you'd get from Godot, Unreal, or Unity. You either have to build that layer yourself, or work with what is effectively assembly (as opposed to e.g. C). The engine layer can be extremely thin, which is why Löve (or its peers, like SDL, Allegro, Pygame...) work great for small or "outside the box" games, but you use different tools for different jobs. If you're building a cookie-cutter game, writing your own engine is a waste of your most precious resource: time and effort. But it's an entirely reasonable choice if you're building something like Factorio (which runs on top of Allegro), where an existing engine would just get in your way.
CodeArtisan 3y ago
May be used with Fennel if you prefer a more lisp-alike programming language. https://fennel-lang.org/ https://fennel-lang.org/ https://wiki.fennel-lang.org/Codebases https://wiki.fennel-lang.org/Codebases
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  "Why Fennel?"[1] is an interesting read. [1] - https://fennel-lang.org/rationale https://fennel-lang.org/rationale
python1320 3y ago
Also do not forget the VR/3D version, LÖVR: https://lovr.org/ https://lovr.org/ It is a very good "mini" base that's easy to get started in but gets progressively harder to make anything finished looking, at least presently. Also do not expect Desktop 3D to have first priority although mouse and keyboard is supported. I feel somehow unclean or dirty using Godot and Unreal and the like since they force you to work on their editors. The editors are basically immediately off limits for anyone who wants to mod the base game rapidly for their own enjoyment. A concept like http://sauerbraten.org/ http://sauerbraten.org/ is interesting, but seems to not have taken off for various reasons. Lesson learned I guess is that being able to customize is not everything.
- erwincoumans 3y ago
  Wouter van Oortmerssen, the author of Sauerbraten recently started his own game studio, VoxRay Games. Check out https://twitter.com/wvo https://twitter.com/wvo or his talk about scripting/engine languages: https://youtu.be/TOnhqoUxLy0?feature=shared https://youtu.be/TOnhqoUxLy0?feature=shared and the slides https://enginearchitecture.realtimerendering.com/downloads/reac2023_scripting_language.pdf https://enginearchitecture.realtimerendering.com/downloads/r...
OmarShehata 3y ago
I made one of the first big commercially successful games with with LÖVE (Move or Die - https://moveordiegame.com/ https://moveordiegame.com/). Highly enjoyed it. We had a devblog, doesn't exist anymore unfortunately. The thing I enjoyed the most was the flexibility of Lua, and the whole framework seemed to adopt that mindset. It gave you all the core pieces you need it (audio, input, physics, rendering), and then got out of your way. The drawback to the full flexibility is having to spend time thinking about what design & workflow your wanted (but, really, wasn't a drawback, that's what I wanted, just took more time). We ended up designing a really flexible engine that allowed us to pivot from a 2D puzzle platformer with a story (Concerned Joe) to the action packed fast multiplayer game that Move or Die became.
- idonthaveanacco 3y ago
  How did you go about supporting all those platforms? How much did LÖVE help with/hinder that aspect?
  - fileeditview 3y ago
    That's a really interesting question. I created some small games with Löve and really loved it. However I always found the whole packaging/distribution/deployment a bit of a problematic topic. If you don't just want to distribute a .love file (e.g. you do not want your user to get the Löve runtime themselves) this was basically unsupported and you had to come up with your own solutions.. I still think if the Löve community could improve this part it would help the most.
    - Takennickname 3y ago
      Someone should solve this with a Javascript app in an electron wrapper
      - nunodonato 3y ago
        oh god, no. Please stop trying to push javascript (and your damned node packages) into everything. There are community tools to package LÖVE games for win/mac/linux.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rishav_sharan 3y ago
I have used love2d for a lot of small projects and highly regard it (and absolutely LOVE its community. Personally love2d & Rust have been the most helpful communities I have ever interacted with). But it is NOT a unity replacement. Not even for 2d. Its a framework and not an engine. which means that you have a core engine and there are some community libraries in various states of completion/support that you can use. Else you end up doing everything by yourself. Let's say, you want to do UI, then there are 4-5 options ahead of you and you will no know how well these libraries are maintained till you use them. Very likely you wil find yourself mucking about the code of these libraries to fix weird bugs or adding a feature your game needs. So, great for prototyping and learning about game dev. But not something I recommend for actual projects with dates. Overall IMO, the closest to Unity alternative I can recommend are; 1. Godot 2. Defold 3. Gdevelop (HTML based. No-code development, which can make people love or hate it) 4. CTjs If you are ok with paying for the gamedev - Gamemaker is another solid choice. Each of these have their pros and cans, but are full fledged engines with huge communities and helpful resources to go with them. And if an editor free engine is what you are looking for , Raylib would be highly recommended. My personal requirements would be; * 2d focused * huge community with tutorials & documentation for everything * libraries & extensions for all the usual gamedev stuff like camera, lighting etc. * asset protection baked in * console & mobile export targets. * Steam integration Personally, I am personally leaning heavily towards Raylib using zig bindings - with Gdevelop/CTjs for quick prototyping of ideas. I have tried Rust engines like Bevy, but the Rust tax was too heavy for me and I personally could not proceed beyond simple projects. your mileage may vary. Fyrox is good too, but there are pretty much no tutorials out there. Another dark horse you can consider is the Flame engine on Flutter. Its very feature complete and you get all the mobile niceties for free. it has a nice community but examples, documentation tutorials etc are non existent. Finally, if wishes come true, i'd really like a native version of the Phaser engine which will allow me to code in typescript, have all the existing Phaser features/apis, let me leverage its huge tutorials/resources, generate native binaries, enable baking in assets etc- but we don't have anything like that yet -_-
- pjmlp 3y ago
  From my point of view, all the engines that don't have C# as the main programming language are already out from the "Unity like" pool, followed by not having console support, VR/AR headsets, and being supported in all major industry SDKs.
dgb23 3y ago
I got my first job as a programmer because someone noticed that I’ve been making video games with LÖVE. A similar library would be raylib, that I’ve been using lately. These libraries are simple enough so you can keep everything in your head, and they are powerful enough so you can immediately put stuff on the screen with zero ceremony. This combination makes it extremely productive. It’s the perfect abstraction layer for amateurs and people who are drawn to simplicity.
cies 3y ago
I liked working with it (the library) but learned I hate working with Lua just slightly less than I hate working with JS. At least in JS we now have TS and things like Elm. I ended up moving to https://github.com/libktx/ktx https://github.com/libktx/ktx for that little project.
- cies 3y ago
  Just learned about https://fennel-lang.org/ https://fennel-lang.org/ , could have probably used that as well to avoid Lua.
- slmjkdbtl 3y ago
  Why do you hate Lua?
  - adwn 3y ago
    I'm not the OP, but for me it's the absolutely braindead design decisions around arrays, respectively the lack thereof. Arrays (or lists, vectors, sequences, whatever) are such a fundamental concept that not supporting them directly is inexcusable in my opinion, and very annoying in practice. You can abuse tables (i.e., hashmaps) as arrays, but they exhibit very strange behavior and footguns. For example (keep in mind that #a is supposed to return the length of a table-abused-as-an-array): > a = {} > a[1] = "x" > a[2] = "y" > a[3] = "z" > #a 3 -- okay > a[2] = nil > #a 1 -- wat > a[4] = "w" > #a 4 -- wat > a[2] = nil > #a 4 -- okay (I guess) > a[4] = nil > #a 1 -- wat You can't just print a table, it will only display its memory address – you'll have to write that function yourself. Considering that tables are the fundamental non-scalar datastructure in Lua, and Lua is supposed to be a scripting language with a REPL, this is mind-boggling. Oh, and a table doesn't keep track of the number of its elements, you have to manually iterate over all elements and count them because of ... reasons?
    - msie 3y ago
      Yikes! Sounds worse than Javascript!
keyle 3y ago
I love love2D. It's really a breath of fresh air. I've made many little games and prototypes with it. Lua is fun, and the doco is great. I highly recommend it as a very first dive into game programming. If you're looking in that realm I also have to mention RAYLIB [1]. It might remind you of the XNA days, except it runs on many platforms and it actually works! (sic.) It's a Borland C style one-file include with some serious power. It's also a ton of fun until you segfault 3 mins into gameplay and you have no idea why. But then you can only blame yourself! Final plug is of course PICO8. Very different style once again but so much fun[2]! Simple, cheat-sheet style programming, with all batteries included (pixel/spritesheet editor, mini DAW). And the productivity might surprise you, as you don't agonise for days on your third redesign this month. All of these have vibrant, helpful, communities. You can't go wrong for fun. [1] https://www.raylib.com/ https://www.raylib.com/ [2] https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
- dgb23 3y ago
  > It's also a ton of fun until you segfault 3 mins into gameplay and you have no idea why. But then you can only blame yourself! Raylib has a ton of language bindings. I've been using it with Zig, the integration was seamless and have not encountered these types of bugs yet.
  - stratts 3y ago
    You don't even necessarily need bindings to use Raylib in Zig. It uses Zig's build system so you can just clone Raylib's repo, add a couple of lines to build.zig, and it's ready to go with autocompletion and everything. Both Raylib and Zig include all dependencies too, so I was able to build a single 700kb .exe from Linux, copy that to my Windows machine, and it just worked immediately without any issues. Pretty amazing.
    - rishav_sharan 3y ago
      Would you have any tutorial on how to do this? I am unable to get zig .11 to work with the latest raylib without binding libs. I am not sure what all changes I need to make to build.zig
droogthedroog 3y ago
love2d was kind of my introduction to programming, back in the days. Good times, and a pretty solid framework. :)
w4rh4wk5 3y ago
A question regarding the OpenAL dependency since this came up recently in a discussion (unrelated to LÖVE). Is it okay to use OpenAL (unmodified) on a "closed" platform like iOS, or Nintendo Switch as long as it is dynamically linked? From what I've gathered so far, this is still okay with LGPLv2 since v2 does not have a tivoization clause. LGPL v3 does have the tivoization clause, which demands that the end-user has access to the necessary tooling to unpack, re-link, repack the binary for the used platform. Is this correct?
- jhasse 3y ago
  I think mojoAL was created for this exact reason: https://github.com/icculus/mojoAL https://github.com/icculus/mojoAL Using LGPLv2 might be fine though, many consoles are using Webkit (which contains LGPLv2 code) themselves.
  - w4rh4wk5 3y ago
    Thanks for the link. I came across this, but other devs complained that isn't production ready (yet). Still, I am extremely grateful for all the work Ryan is putting into projects like this.
    - a1o 3y ago
      Why it isn’t production ready?
      - jhasse 3y ago
        Pitch not working for example. This was the main reason I've switched to custom audio mixing in C++: https://github.com/jhasse/jngl/pull/97 https://github.com/jhasse/jngl/pull/97
        a1o 3y ago
        When I tested pitch it was working https://github.com/icculus/mojoAL/blob/1adfdf5cd5447c68e11b0ab9f74318a4e364e7c9/mojoal.c#L1224 https://github.com/icculus/mojoAL/blob/1adfdf5cd5447c68e11b0... I overall have a good experience with mojoAL.
brennopost 3y ago
I love LOVE! Have made many cool projects and prototypes with it. My favorite is my Minecraft clone, which has full 3D. https://github.com/brennop/lunarcraft https://github.com/brennop/lunarcraft
- trescenzi 3y ago
  Thanks for this link! I've been wanting to try love but it's hard to find a real codebase that's small enough to just read through to learn it but also complex enough to be realistic. This seems like a great example.
  - brennopost 3y ago
    I may also recommend the BYTEPATH tutorial [1] as it was my first introduction to LOVE game making. [1]: https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/30 https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/30
- no_time 3y ago
  LÖVE 11.3, Win10 21H1, AMD 6700XT - There seems to be some issue with Z ordering. https://imgur.com/a/d7ojRO7 https://imgur.com/a/d7ojRO7 EDIT: looks correct albeit choppy on LÖVE 11.3, Ubuntu 20.04, i3-4160 integrated. Nice job btw.
  - brennopost 3y ago
    Yeah, I've noticed these issues with Windows, but didn't bother fixing as this is more a learning project to better understand games like Minecraft. Might test some different compare modes for "love.graphics.setDepthMode" later to see if it fixes it.
junon 3y ago
It's a fun framework but doing anything advanced in it is a pain. Offloading to other threads etc doesn't work well, at least when we tried, and requires that the messages sent on channels are basic Lua objects, which can get messy quickly and hurt performance in our case. Further, the source is entirely reversible and thus can be stolen. Conversely, we couldn't get LOVE to build on its own (from sources). Perhaps that's improved since ~4 years ago. We ultimately had to ditch LOVE, but it was fun and cute while it lasted. For simpler or more straightforward projects, I'd consider picking it up again.
darkFunction 3y ago
I used and loved this framework years ago so happy to see it’s still thriving. I’d love to start making games with my son now he’s getting older, but I always used to hit a roadblock with the artwork. In this age of AI, can anyone recommend free/cheap ways of acquiring good animated sprites for hobby projects?
- mhitza 3y ago
  When I was playing around with Godot and 2D game development, I went to itch.io for free asset packs. It's hard to get a consistent art-style, but good enough for a beginner.
  - opyate 3y ago
    If you have 10 bucks lying around, the comprehensive Kenney pack is good value (on sale, usu. $20), and with consistent art styles. https://kenney.itch.io/kenney-game-assets https://kenney.itch.io/kenney-game-assets (no affiliation, it's just good stuff)
- modernerd 3y ago
  You might need to dig around a little for animated sprite sheets, but there are plenty of good quality free 2d assets: https://www.kenney.nl/assets https://www.kenney.nl/assets https://itch.io/game-assets/free https://itch.io/game-assets/free https://opengameart.org/ https://opengameart.org/
- wsc981 3y ago
  If you subscribe to Humble Bundle newsletters, you will occasionally get nice deals on sound, music and/or sprite assets. I’ve bought many nice asset bundles here for a very reasonable price.
- p0nce 3y ago
  Honestly maybe easier to just do it in aseprite, at first it will be daunting but in the end enjoyable.
jmiskovic 3y ago
I made an Android app in it, a collection of musical instruments to play. The engine was a joy to work in. Everything in its API is laid out neatly and easy to remember. The code-only experience fits me perfectly - instead of stringing together some static assets I can focus on procedural animations and fun dynamical behaviors. The result feels more alive, like what Bret Victor describes in "Stop drawing the dead fish" talk. Using LÖVE on Android was also pretty effortless. I could fire up a mobile text editor and fix Lua bugs or tweak animation constants. Every desktop feature worked the same on the phone. I could even tweak the audio framework to get optimal latency values. I would never get the chance to tweak under the hood had I chosen some closed source engine. Since then I've "graduated" to 3D with LÖVR. It is completely different code with the same philosophy of surface simplicity and ample room for growth.
- belugacat 3y ago
  Link to the musical app?
  - jmiskovic 3y ago
    It's in my profile, I wanted to focus on experience with LÖVE instead of shilling. (thanks for interest!)
    - belugacat 3y ago
      unsolicited feedback you might care about or not: it doesn't run on my Pixel 6A :( shame, i was very excited to try it!
      - jmiskovic 3y ago
        My friend runs it on the same model. The next step would be to try LÖVE's official interpreter [1] and see that it runs. That app & the docs are actually all you need to develop a full application right on your mobile phone. You could fetch Hexpress's source code and put it on the /sdcard/lovegame and the official LÖVE interpreter should run it fine, just with more latency. If you'd like to pursue this further, please reach out on GitHub issues. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.love2d.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.love2d.and...
otikik 3y ago
I did many semi-popular libraries for this engine, it was my first introduction to Lua, which eventually gave me a job (not on gamedev - openresty). The community was helpful and welcoming. I have not done gamedev in a while, finding the time is difficult with a growing family. But it still makes me happy when someone pings me about one of my libraries.
vongomben 3y ago
How do you compare the learning curve of Love to p5.js? Do you think Love could be used as a teaching / steam tool in k12?
- boredtofears 3y ago
  It's used in the first couple lessons in Harvard's (free) intro to game dev course: https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cs50s-introduction-game-development https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cs50s-introduction-game-devel...
smko 3y ago
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Andrew018 3y ago
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no_time 3y ago
LÖVE + Zerobrane for IDE is my single favorite to write software that puts pixels on the screen. a few reasons why I love it -Both the IDE and the framework are lightweight enough to run comfortably even on an RPI. -The single best documentation I've ever used for any piece of development tool. Lots of examples, concise and made for max velocity. -Excellent forum with friendly people. It has taken a bit of a backseat to project Discord, which I find a bit sad. But everyone is helpful there too. -Great ecosystem of just about any library you can ask for. It has kind of spoiled software development for me. I tried getting the hang of similar technologies many times without success. Atleast now I understand the people who still go on about how great their QuickBASIC / TurboPascal workflow was back in the days. That being said there ARE a few areas in LÖVE that leave things to be desired: - I feel like the devs are a bit too trigger happy to make API changes. Though fixing a big chunk of these are a matter of a few search + replaces. - The rendering can feel oddly slow?? Especially on Android I kept bumping into weird scenarios where I felt like it should hit 60 FPS no problem, even with the Lua JIT inactive. - There aren't many resources about how to make good use of threading features to speed up common performance problems. There is definetly room for a "LÖVE2D Performance Necronomicon" to be written by someone who is more knowledgeable in CompSci fundamentals than me. :^)
- dleslie 3y ago
  Interesting, apparently Fennel works with Zerobrane; so I could write Lisp with LOVE. https://wiki.fennel-lang.org/Editors https://wiki.fennel-lang.org/Editors
  - donio 3y ago
    You can also use Emacs and fennel-mode and then M-x fennel-repl to get a live repl from your Emacs session and then use lisp-eval-last-sexp, doc lookup and other Lisp conveniences. https://gitlab.com/alexjgriffith/min-love2d-fennel https://gitlab.com/alexjgriffith/min-love2d-fennel shows a basic setup that enables the repl too.
- CodeL 3y ago
  Agreed! The LÖVE community could benefit from more advanced resources, especially on performance optimization. Perhaps it's an opportunity for experienced developers to contribute.
saaspirant 3y ago
Solar2D[0] (formerly Corona SDK) is also based on Love2D. I got into programming via Corona SDK inspired by Bubble ball[1] made by a 14 y.o boy. Edit: This brings back so many memories [0]https://solar2d.com/ https://solar2d.com/ [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Ball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Ball
- rstupek 3y ago
  Based on Lua you mean? As far as I'm aware Solar2D has never been based on Love2D
  - saaspirant 3y ago
    Oh I don't remember clearly. It has been years. I vaguely remember something like "Corona SDK uses Love2D" engine, maybe I hallucinated
Medium_Taco 3y ago
As a warning for love2D, it is very easy to get the source code, since the .love file is really just a zip that can be easily extracted
- mkesper 3y ago
  And that's a good thing!
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    It makes it trivial to steal your code, make cheats, or bypass how you monetize your game. It's not necessarily a good thing.
  - Medium_Taco 3y ago
    It is neat. But if you are considering using love for something you intend to charge for, it is probably bad. I was able to look at the source code for a steam demo that should no longer be playable, modify it to make it playable, and then make a new exe. Just something to be aware of.
alphazard 3y ago
Doesn't the umlaut seem like a bad marketing decision? Yes Unicode is cool, I'm glad we have it, I'm glad increasingly more things support it. I don't know the key combination for any character modifier off-hand, I usually copy these sorts of characters from google when I need them. It seems like it makes this framework unnecessarily harder to find.
- Okx 3y ago
  Not only that, but it makes the pronunciation difficult. Should this be pronounced like the English word "love", or interpreted more like a German word (which actually has this letter in the alphabet, and guess what, it isn't the same as o) and more like "loeve"? The umlaut isn't just a graphical stylisation, it's a real thing.
  - lutoma 3y ago
    Yeah it's really irritating when American companies (or bands) put an Umlaut in their name but then just pronounce it like the regular letter.
    - edflsafoiewq 3y ago
      English has it's own usage of the diaeresis, unrelated to the German umlaut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)
  - ginko 3y ago
    It obviously should be pronounced like løve.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- edflsafoiewq 3y ago
  You don't have to type the umlaut.
nanna 3y ago
As I get older especially I find myself with less and less time to learn things that aren't somehow useful to my life, like game programming. It's sad.
- minkzilla 3y ago
  Take a stab at it with love. If you already code professionally you can have a simple platformer or asteriods type game up in running in an hour or two
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 3y ago
  What things are somehow useful to your life anyway?
- luxurytent 3y ago
  Do you have kids? If so, learn to write a game with your code by your side! That's what I'm doing, and I generally feel the same as you (NO GODAMN TIME!) :)
jdlyga 3y ago
This is the framework used for Gravity Circuit, the Mega Man X inspired game that came out last month. It’s one of the best games of the year, by the way. I’ve been interested in exploring this framework. Glad to see it’s gotten attention on HN
Pxtl 3y ago
I love the concept of Lua, but the linguistic features always drive me up the wall. Poor FP functionality, the weird double-dipping on associative and non-associative arrays into the same data structure, and 1-based arrays all drive me batty. But I'll always gladly suffer through it in exchange for an easy and clean and secure embedding API. So yeah, I totally understand why LOVE is made like that, but I don't think I'll use it.
- lucasoshiro 3y ago
  Yeah, those are decisions that needed to be made in order to make Lua simple enough for being embedded. And I find its syntax very smart: it is not object-oriented, but using the : syntax sugar you can pretend it is (Löve does that); if you want to write something in a FP way, you also can do it. Of course it's not like using an OOP or FP language, but it does the job. Other cool syntax sugar is that you can omit the parentheses when calling a function that only have a string or table as a parameter, it is useful for creating simple DSLs. Lua was never meant to be the main language of anyone, but given the problem that it wants to solve, I'm amazed on how much we can do with it! On the other hand, JS was very similar to Lua. It wasn't object-oriented, but we could pretend it was, just like Lua. However, people started to use it for things that it wasn't meant to do when it was created, and it was extended with more features. Lua still have the same purpose, keeping its simple syntax. Some years ago, the creator of Lua was invited to my university. He told us about some of the decisions that were made in Lua. For example: - about it being indexed by 1: at the time, arrays indexed by 0 wasn't as popular as today. Lua was created in 1993, it is older than Java, JS and many other languages that we use today that are 0-based. A decision had to be made, and they chose to start at 1, as it was easier for non-programmers to write formulae - about it using -- as comments: it was inspired by Haskell - about it not having a ++ operator: that would increase the complexity of the syntax, and a -- operator wouldn't be possible due to that decision above
- newobj 3y ago
  https://typescripttolua.github.io/ https://typescripttolua.github.io/
Nuthen 3y ago
First I had an unsuccessful journey with GameMaker, then a lot of time spent modding Minecraft in middle school without really understanding how to code. Finally, LÖVE ended up becoming my main time-sink for most of my free time through high school, about a decade ago. Every evening I would start a new project. Some were random game ideas, some were to study certain aspects of math (like fractals), some were just meant to be nice to look at. This is where I learned a lot about game design, and also a lot of the harder aspects of programming (after that, my college CS degree ended up being a breeze). I was working alongside an internet friend on these. Sometimes we would collaborate on something exciting, sometimes we would work alone on something and share lots of progress updates between each other. It was a really fun time. I think LÖVE having no GUI really helped our minds to run free while we learned how powerful computers could be. Some of my LÖVE projects I remember the most fondly: - A gravity simulation / art canvas where ships would fly around planets and paint a trail behind them [1]. - An online multiplayer platformer roguelike with full rollback netcode that handles 150ms+ ping (this was a real challenge!) - never completed. - An online pseudo-rhythm game where you only have one button to use and you have to work with your friends to input in the correct order while a timer keeps ticking down [2]. The last one still lives rent free in my mind. This one still gets downloads today, it's the most popular project I've been a part of. But I suspect most players don't get past the step of needing to forward ports and find 3 friends to play a short 5 minute indie game. I'm proud of the idea behind it, but I don't have a good way to turn it into a full game without ruining the core idea. LÖVE was my tool of choice for many gamejams, it was a breeze to put together a prototype once I had gotten comfortable. Today I think I have more perspective and wish I could go back in time to see more of my 100+ prototypes to completion, instead of always finding a reason something was imperfect and not worth pursuing. Now I just don't have the same amount of energy when I get home from my software day job, I often need the time just to unwind. Lately I'm trying to push through and make gamedev a habit even if it's hard, to get back some of the joy during the days I was in love with LÖVE. Edit: Formatting [1] https://love2d.org/imgmirrur/aIkrkdBl.png?1 https://love2d.org/imgmirrur/aIkrkdBl.png?1 [2] https://ikroth.itch.io/boss-bashing-button-brawlers https://ikroth.itch.io/boss-bashing-button-brawlers
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  > An online multiplayer platformer roguelike with full rollback netcode that handles 150ms+ ping (this was a real challenge!) - never completed. I worked on something similar in high school(also never finished). Implementing good netcode on a novel multiplayer game can be very hard to get right. Made me a lot more forgiving of games that didn't do it well. You pretty much need to design your game with multiplayer in mind.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
An excellent sequal to the classic flash game "Mud and Blood 2" is written using the LOVE engine. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1391530/Mud_and_Blood/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1391530/Mud_and_Blood/
mahastore 3y ago
How does this framework compare to Bitty - another game engine framework which is also on todays HN first page?
liveoneggs 3y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b16rgLIf8I4&list=PLhQjrBD2T383Vx9-4vJYFsJbvZ_D17Qzh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b16rgLIf8I4&list=PLhQjrBD2T3... <- free game programming course based on love
- CobrastanJorji 3y ago
  Is there any language, platform, or trend that CS50 hasn't somehow managed to find?
manicennui 3y ago
If you'd like to use LOVE with a lisp, fennel can be used. https://gitlab.com/alexjgriffith/min-love2d-fennel https://gitlab.com/alexjgriffith/min-love2d-fennel
iamnotsure 3y ago
mistake vote, gc language. hn unvoting dark patterns.
newobj 3y ago
i feel obligated once again to mention TSTL, a very high quality TypeScript-to-Lua transpiler: https://typescripttolua.github.io/ https://typescripttolua.github.io/ works great. used this on a large project. works great with Love/LuaJIT too.
dang 3y ago
Related. Others? LÖVE 11.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16731397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16731397 - April 2018 (2 comments) How to make a game from scratch using Lua and Löve - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404230 - Feb 2018 (102 comments) LÖVE 0.10 released with iOS and Android support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10780579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10780579 - Dec 2015 (91 comments) Create 2D games in Lua and LÖVE. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3745631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3745631 - March 2012 (18 comments) Löve 0.7.1 (lua game framework) is released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262808 - Feb 2011 (14 comments) LÖVE 0.6.0 (lua game library) is released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1019682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1019682 - Dec 2009 (15 comments) LÖVE - a 2D game engine for rapid game development in Lua - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457129 - Jan 2009 (12 comments)
binary132 3y ago
The main thing that makes me a little sad about LÖVE is that LuaJIT is not really RISC-V friendly yet (yes I know about the fork.) I am interested in focusing on RISC-V for some personal projects so my requirements are a little unusual, but LuaJIT has a pretty high barrier to adding new backends. Usually it needs to be industrially sponsored, too. LuaJIT can also have unpredictable performance characteristics, if it matters.
nebula8804 3y ago
Oh Man I haven't heard of this framework in years! There was this amazing fan game made to mimic an episode of this tv show called Community. The show is about a group of community college students getting into all sorts of hijinks and one episode had all of them go into this video 8 bit video game world....so LÖVE was used to recreate the game exactly as you see in the show. Unfortunately it is running on a very old version at this point and I hear due to how the framework has changed upgrading is not straightforward. It interesting to see how software changes and grows over time. Fortunately the last version released still seems to work fine on modern machines. (at least it runs on my M1 Mac) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzhuvOqfmC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzhuvOqfmC4 [2]: http://projecthawkthorne.com/ http://projecthawkthorne.com/ [3]: gameplay footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imv6J8dqLyE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imv6J8dqLyE What blew me away 10 years ago was the complexity of the game that you could produce in LÖVE. its astounding!
mega_tux 3y ago
I'm trying to do something with DragonRuby Game Toolkit (Ruby is my main tool) but LÖVE always seemed nice, too. I also like Moonscript as an alternative to Lua language ( https://moonscript.org/ https://moonscript.org/ )

556 points by rapnie 3y ago

For some giggling, look at names of libraries: https://love2d.org/wiki/Category:Libraries https://love2d.org/wiki/Category:Libraries - Möan.lua - A messagebox system with multiple-choices and more (renamed to Talkies) - Gspöt - GUI library for Love ...

evertedsphere 3y ago
>"Lily" and "yaoui" on successive lines
chii 3y ago
Nothing wrong with a good naming scheme.
- GhostWhisperer 3y ago
  until you want to teach gamedev to kids
  - worble 3y ago
    Kids can enjoy dirty jokes too
    - GhostWhisperer 3y ago
      it's obvious you don't have kids, or have ever been in a position of tutoring someone else's kids
      - yetihehe 3y ago
        Some children really enjoy dirty jokes, it's typically adults who react negatively to dirty jokes from kids.
        fileeditview 3y ago
        Children will be totally distracted by things like that. Instead of concentrating on the actual task/goal they will focus on funny/silly words and this is not helping in teaching them something.
dxuh 3y ago
There was a time when this was really popular, but most of the löve community has abandoned this to be more accessible to kids and just to look less infantile. I think those names are mostly frowned upon now and many of the popular libs have been in fact renamed.
- nunodonato 3y ago
  I was from that time. So many giggles with the names people would come up with :D
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

alainchabat 3y ago

wanted to kudo for the refreshing design

V__ 3y ago

This week has to be Christmas for people who developed an engine not named Unity.

maccard 3y ago
I'm a big fan of love2d, but for _almost everyone_ it's not a replacement for unity. Looking at https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Love2D/ https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Love2D/, there's only two games on that list that (based on steamspy numbers) that would actually be affected by the recent pricing changes. If you're objecting to Unity on moral grounds for it's new DRM philosophies, or it's CEO, well those were just as valid almost 10 years ago.
- throwawee 3y ago
  Yeah. I've had fun with Love2D but it's not even an engine, really. It mostly just wraps SDL functions (and a few other libraries). If that fits your use case exactly, go for it! But if you're looking for the FOSS equivalent of Unity, Godot is pretty much exactly that.
raincole 3y ago
Love2D has been there forever. It's not a replacement for Unity. The only open source project that remotely resembles Unity is Godot.
- raincole 3y ago
  I forgot Stride: https://www.stride3d.net https://www.stride3d.net It was not completely open source, but it is now (if I didn't read it wrong).
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Well, a lot of what people make with Unity could be done perfectly well with Löve. It's not intended to replace the Unity target public, but Unity is used well beyond its target public.
progbits 3y ago

jay_kyburz 3y ago

I'm a huge fan of Love and have many side projects on the go. I quite like Lua although it took some getting used to. You would have to be fairly disciplined to work on a big game with multiple programmers. The c# of Unity means you can be fairly lazy rely on the IDE to help you work out what is going on. I imagine you could make a real mess with Lua. It's much better than Godot and Love is a really solid foundation to build your game on.

TheRoque 3y ago
Well, godot does 3D as well as 2D and has a fully-fledged GUI editor, so I don't get the comparison and in what regards Love is "better".
- sim7c00 3y ago
  For games which do not require a level editor i'd agree love is better. but this is only a small subset of games perhaps. other cases, an editor is definitely useful. making an editor yourself is really, really tedious.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  I spent a few months working on Godot and it was clear that the developers don't actually make games, and don't have the same priorities as me. I want a real solid foundation to build on. Nobody likes to put down such a great looking open source project, but I decided it was not for me.
  - TheRoque 3y ago
    I am curious what issues you ran into. Also, there are about 50 games per year released with Godot on steam, so there are definitely people pulling it off
    - jay_kyburz 3y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27624646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27624646

boffinAudio 3y ago

Speaking of Lua based Game Engines, I wish MOAI had managed to survive the onslaught of App-store policies designed to kill it. It was a really fun way to build apps. I wonder if anyone has ported Hanappe, which is a GUI framework on top of MOAI, to LOVE yet ... https://github.com/makotok/Hanappe https://github.com/makotok/Hanappe Maybe its time to revive MOAI and bring some heat to these frameworks ..

nathias 3y ago

I really love that love has no gui, every other game framwork I tried is 1000s of stacked gui windows...

rollcat 3y ago
Löve is more of a library/framework than a full engine. It's a whole layer of the stack below what you'd get from Godot, Unreal, or Unity. You either have to build that layer yourself, or work with what is effectively assembly (as opposed to e.g. C). The engine layer can be extremely thin, which is why Löve (or its peers, like SDL, Allegro, Pygame...) work great for small or "outside the box" games, but you use different tools for different jobs. If you're building a cookie-cutter game, writing your own engine is a waste of your most precious resource: time and effort. But it's an entirely reasonable choice if you're building something like Factorio (which runs on top of Allegro), where an existing engine would just get in your way.

CodeArtisan 3y ago

May be used with Fennel if you prefer a more lisp-alike programming language. https://fennel-lang.org/ https://fennel-lang.org/ https://wiki.fennel-lang.org/Codebases https://wiki.fennel-lang.org/Codebases

pmoriarty 3y ago
"Why Fennel?"[1] is an interesting read. [1] - https://fennel-lang.org/rationale https://fennel-lang.org/rationale

python1320 3y ago

Also do not forget the VR/3D version, LÖVR: https://lovr.org/ https://lovr.org/ It is a very good "mini" base that's easy to get started in but gets progressively harder to make anything finished looking, at least presently. Also do not expect Desktop 3D to have first priority although mouse and keyboard is supported. I feel somehow unclean or dirty using Godot and Unreal and the like since they force you to work on their editors. The editors are basically immediately off limits for anyone who wants to mod the base game rapidly for their own enjoyment. A concept like http://sauerbraten.org/ http://sauerbraten.org/ is interesting, but seems to not have taken off for various reasons. Lesson learned I guess is that being able to customize is not everything.

erwincoumans 3y ago
Wouter van Oortmerssen, the author of Sauerbraten recently started his own game studio, VoxRay Games. Check out https://twitter.com/wvo https://twitter.com/wvo or his talk about scripting/engine languages: https://youtu.be/TOnhqoUxLy0?feature=shared https://youtu.be/TOnhqoUxLy0?feature=shared and the slides https://enginearchitecture.realtimerendering.com/downloads/reac2023_scripting_language.pdf https://enginearchitecture.realtimerendering.com/downloads/r...

OmarShehata 3y ago

I made one of the first big commercially successful games with with LÖVE (Move or Die - https://moveordiegame.com/ https://moveordiegame.com/). Highly enjoyed it. We had a devblog, doesn't exist anymore unfortunately. The thing I enjoyed the most was the flexibility of Lua, and the whole framework seemed to adopt that mindset. It gave you all the core pieces you need it (audio, input, physics, rendering), and then got out of your way. The drawback to the full flexibility is having to spend time thinking about what design & workflow your wanted (but, really, wasn't a drawback, that's what I wanted, just took more time). We ended up designing a really flexible engine that allowed us to pivot from a 2D puzzle platformer with a story (Concerned Joe) to the action packed fast multiplayer game that Move or Die became.

idonthaveanacco 3y ago
How did you go about supporting all those platforms? How much did LÖVE help with/hinder that aspect?
- fileeditview 3y ago
  That's a really interesting question. I created some small games with Löve and really loved it. However I always found the whole packaging/distribution/deployment a bit of a problematic topic. If you don't just want to distribute a .love file (e.g. you do not want your user to get the Löve runtime themselves) this was basically unsupported and you had to come up with your own solutions.. I still think if the Löve community could improve this part it would help the most.
  - Takennickname 3y ago
    Someone should solve this with a Javascript app in an electron wrapper
    - nunodonato 3y ago
      oh god, no. Please stop trying to push javascript (and your damned node packages) into everything. There are community tools to package LÖVE games for win/mac/linux.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rishav_sharan 3y ago

I have used love2d for a lot of small projects and highly regard it (and absolutely LOVE its community. Personally love2d & Rust have been the most helpful communities I have ever interacted with). But it is NOT a unity replacement. Not even for 2d. Its a framework and not an engine. which means that you have a core engine and there are some community libraries in various states of completion/support that you can use. Else you end up doing everything by yourself. Let's say, you want to do UI, then there are 4-5 options ahead of you and you will no know how well these libraries are maintained till you use them. Very likely you wil find yourself mucking about the code of these libraries to fix weird bugs or adding a feature your game needs. So, great for prototyping and learning about game dev. But not something I recommend for actual projects with dates. Overall IMO, the closest to Unity alternative I can recommend are; 1. Godot 2. Defold 3. Gdevelop (HTML based. No-code development, which can make people love or hate it) 4. CTjs If you are ok with paying for the gamedev - Gamemaker is another solid choice. Each of these have their pros and cans, but are full fledged engines with huge communities and helpful resources to go with them. And if an editor free engine is what you are looking for , Raylib would be highly recommended. My personal requirements would be; * 2d focused * huge community with tutorials & documentation for everything * libraries & extensions for all the usual gamedev stuff like camera, lighting etc. * asset protection baked in * console & mobile export targets. * Steam integration Personally, I am personally leaning heavily towards Raylib using zig bindings - with Gdevelop/CTjs for quick prototyping of ideas. I have tried Rust engines like Bevy, but the Rust tax was too heavy for me and I personally could not proceed beyond simple projects. your mileage may vary. Fyrox is good too, but there are pretty much no tutorials out there. Another dark horse you can consider is the Flame engine on Flutter. Its very feature complete and you get all the mobile niceties for free. it has a nice community but examples, documentation tutorials etc are non existent. Finally, if wishes come true, i'd really like a native version of the Phaser engine which will allow me to code in typescript, have all the existing Phaser features/apis, let me leverage its huge tutorials/resources, generate native binaries, enable baking in assets etc- but we don't have anything like that yet -_-

pjmlp 3y ago
From my point of view, all the engines that don't have C# as the main programming language are already out from the "Unity like" pool, followed by not having console support, VR/AR headsets, and being supported in all major industry SDKs.

dgb23 3y ago

I got my first job as a programmer because someone noticed that I’ve been making video games with LÖVE. A similar library would be raylib, that I’ve been using lately. These libraries are simple enough so you can keep everything in your head, and they are powerful enough so you can immediately put stuff on the screen with zero ceremony. This combination makes it extremely productive. It’s the perfect abstraction layer for amateurs and people who are drawn to simplicity.

cies 3y ago

I liked working with it (the library) but learned I hate working with Lua just slightly less than I hate working with JS. At least in JS we now have TS and things like Elm. I ended up moving to https://github.com/libktx/ktx https://github.com/libktx/ktx for that little project.

cies 3y ago
Just learned about https://fennel-lang.org/ https://fennel-lang.org/ , could have probably used that as well to avoid Lua.
slmjkdbtl 3y ago
Why do you hate Lua?
- adwn 3y ago
  I'm not the OP, but for me it's the absolutely braindead design decisions around arrays, respectively the lack thereof. Arrays (or lists, vectors, sequences, whatever) are such a fundamental concept that not supporting them directly is inexcusable in my opinion, and very annoying in practice. You can abuse tables (i.e., hashmaps) as arrays, but they exhibit very strange behavior and footguns. For example (keep in mind that #a is supposed to return the length of a table-abused-as-an-array): > a = {} > a[1] = "x" > a[2] = "y" > a[3] = "z" > #a 3 -- okay > a[2] = nil > #a 1 -- wat > a[4] = "w" > #a 4 -- wat > a[2] = nil > #a 4 -- okay (I guess) > a[4] = nil > #a 1 -- wat You can't just print a table, it will only display its memory address – you'll have to write that function yourself. Considering that tables are the fundamental non-scalar datastructure in Lua, and Lua is supposed to be a scripting language with a REPL, this is mind-boggling. Oh, and a table doesn't keep track of the number of its elements, you have to manually iterate over all elements and count them because of ... reasons?
  - msie 3y ago
    Yikes! Sounds worse than Javascript!

keyle 3y ago

I love love2D. It's really a breath of fresh air. I've made many little games and prototypes with it. Lua is fun, and the doco is great. I highly recommend it as a very first dive into game programming. If you're looking in that realm I also have to mention RAYLIB [1]. It might remind you of the XNA days, except it runs on many platforms and it actually works! (sic.) It's a Borland C style one-file include with some serious power. It's also a ton of fun until you segfault 3 mins into gameplay and you have no idea why. But then you can only blame yourself! Final plug is of course PICO8. Very different style once again but so much fun[2]! Simple, cheat-sheet style programming, with all batteries included (pixel/spritesheet editor, mini DAW). And the productivity might surprise you, as you don't agonise for days on your third redesign this month. All of these have vibrant, helpful, communities. You can't go wrong for fun. [1] https://www.raylib.com/ https://www.raylib.com/ [2] https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

dgb23 3y ago
> It's also a ton of fun until you segfault 3 mins into gameplay and you have no idea why. But then you can only blame yourself! Raylib has a ton of language bindings. I've been using it with Zig, the integration was seamless and have not encountered these types of bugs yet.
- stratts 3y ago
  You don't even necessarily need bindings to use Raylib in Zig. It uses Zig's build system so you can just clone Raylib's repo, add a couple of lines to build.zig, and it's ready to go with autocompletion and everything. Both Raylib and Zig include all dependencies too, so I was able to build a single 700kb .exe from Linux, copy that to my Windows machine, and it just worked immediately without any issues. Pretty amazing.
  - rishav_sharan 3y ago
    Would you have any tutorial on how to do this? I am unable to get zig .11 to work with the latest raylib without binding libs. I am not sure what all changes I need to make to build.zig

droogthedroog 3y ago

love2d was kind of my introduction to programming, back in the days. Good times, and a pretty solid framework. :)

w4rh4wk5 3y ago

A question regarding the OpenAL dependency since this came up recently in a discussion (unrelated to LÖVE). Is it okay to use OpenAL (unmodified) on a "closed" platform like iOS, or Nintendo Switch as long as it is dynamically linked? From what I've gathered so far, this is still okay with LGPLv2 since v2 does not have a tivoization clause. LGPL v3 does have the tivoization clause, which demands that the end-user has access to the necessary tooling to unpack, re-link, repack the binary for the used platform. Is this correct?

jhasse 3y ago
I think mojoAL was created for this exact reason: https://github.com/icculus/mojoAL https://github.com/icculus/mojoAL Using LGPLv2 might be fine though, many consoles are using Webkit (which contains LGPLv2 code) themselves.
- w4rh4wk5 3y ago
  Thanks for the link. I came across this, but other devs complained that isn't production ready (yet). Still, I am extremely grateful for all the work Ryan is putting into projects like this.
  - a1o 3y ago
    Why it isn’t production ready?
    - jhasse 3y ago
      Pitch not working for example. This was the main reason I've switched to custom audio mixing in C++: https://github.com/jhasse/jngl/pull/97 https://github.com/jhasse/jngl/pull/97
      - a1o 3y ago
        When I tested pitch it was working https://github.com/icculus/mojoAL/blob/1adfdf5cd5447c68e11b0ab9f74318a4e364e7c9/mojoal.c#L1224 https://github.com/icculus/mojoAL/blob/1adfdf5cd5447c68e11b0... I overall have a good experience with mojoAL.

brennopost 3y ago

I love LOVE! Have made many cool projects and prototypes with it. My favorite is my Minecraft clone, which has full 3D. https://github.com/brennop/lunarcraft https://github.com/brennop/lunarcraft

trescenzi 3y ago
Thanks for this link! I've been wanting to try love but it's hard to find a real codebase that's small enough to just read through to learn it but also complex enough to be realistic. This seems like a great example.
- brennopost 3y ago
  I may also recommend the BYTEPATH tutorial [1] as it was my first introduction to LOVE game making. [1]: https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/30 https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/30
no_time 3y ago
LÖVE 11.3, Win10 21H1, AMD 6700XT - There seems to be some issue with Z ordering. https://imgur.com/a/d7ojRO7 https://imgur.com/a/d7ojRO7 EDIT: looks correct albeit choppy on LÖVE 11.3, Ubuntu 20.04, i3-4160 integrated. Nice job btw.
- brennopost 3y ago
  Yeah, I've noticed these issues with Windows, but didn't bother fixing as this is more a learning project to better understand games like Minecraft. Might test some different compare modes for "love.graphics.setDepthMode" later to see if it fixes it.

junon 3y ago

It's a fun framework but doing anything advanced in it is a pain. Offloading to other threads etc doesn't work well, at least when we tried, and requires that the messages sent on channels are basic Lua objects, which can get messy quickly and hurt performance in our case. Further, the source is entirely reversible and thus can be stolen. Conversely, we couldn't get LOVE to build on its own (from sources). Perhaps that's improved since ~4 years ago. We ultimately had to ditch LOVE, but it was fun and cute while it lasted. For simpler or more straightforward projects, I'd consider picking it up again.

darkFunction 3y ago

I used and loved this framework years ago so happy to see it’s still thriving. I’d love to start making games with my son now he’s getting older, but I always used to hit a roadblock with the artwork. In this age of AI, can anyone recommend free/cheap ways of acquiring good animated sprites for hobby projects?

mhitza 3y ago
When I was playing around with Godot and 2D game development, I went to itch.io for free asset packs. It's hard to get a consistent art-style, but good enough for a beginner.
- opyate 3y ago
  If you have 10 bucks lying around, the comprehensive Kenney pack is good value (on sale, usu. $20), and with consistent art styles. https://kenney.itch.io/kenney-game-assets https://kenney.itch.io/kenney-game-assets (no affiliation, it's just good stuff)
modernerd 3y ago
You might need to dig around a little for animated sprite sheets, but there are plenty of good quality free 2d assets: https://www.kenney.nl/assets https://www.kenney.nl/assets https://itch.io/game-assets/free https://itch.io/game-assets/free https://opengameart.org/ https://opengameart.org/
wsc981 3y ago
If you subscribe to Humble Bundle newsletters, you will occasionally get nice deals on sound, music and/or sprite assets. I’ve bought many nice asset bundles here for a very reasonable price.
p0nce 3y ago
Honestly maybe easier to just do it in aseprite, at first it will be daunting but in the end enjoyable.

jmiskovic 3y ago

I made an Android app in it, a collection of musical instruments to play. The engine was a joy to work in. Everything in its API is laid out neatly and easy to remember. The code-only experience fits me perfectly - instead of stringing together some static assets I can focus on procedural animations and fun dynamical behaviors. The result feels more alive, like what Bret Victor describes in "Stop drawing the dead fish" talk. Using LÖVE on Android was also pretty effortless. I could fire up a mobile text editor and fix Lua bugs or tweak animation constants. Every desktop feature worked the same on the phone. I could even tweak the audio framework to get optimal latency values. I would never get the chance to tweak under the hood had I chosen some closed source engine. Since then I've "graduated" to 3D with LÖVR. It is completely different code with the same philosophy of surface simplicity and ample room for growth.

belugacat 3y ago
Link to the musical app?
- jmiskovic 3y ago
  It's in my profile, I wanted to focus on experience with LÖVE instead of shilling. (thanks for interest!)
  - belugacat 3y ago
    unsolicited feedback you might care about or not: it doesn't run on my Pixel 6A :( shame, i was very excited to try it!
    - jmiskovic 3y ago
      My friend runs it on the same model. The next step would be to try LÖVE's official interpreter [1] and see that it runs. That app & the docs are actually all you need to develop a full application right on your mobile phone. You could fetch Hexpress's source code and put it on the /sdcard/lovegame and the official LÖVE interpreter should run it fine, just with more latency. If you'd like to pursue this further, please reach out on GitHub issues. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.love2d.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.love2d.and...

otikik 3y ago

I did many semi-popular libraries for this engine, it was my first introduction to Lua, which eventually gave me a job (not on gamedev - openresty). The community was helpful and welcoming. I have not done gamedev in a while, finding the time is difficult with a growing family. But it still makes me happy when someone pings me about one of my libraries.

vongomben 3y ago

How do you compare the learning curve of Love to p5.js? Do you think Love could be used as a teaching / steam tool in k12?

boredtofears 3y ago
It's used in the first couple lessons in Harvard's (free) intro to game dev course: https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cs50s-introduction-game-development https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cs50s-introduction-game-devel...

smko 3y ago

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Andrew018 3y ago

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no_time 3y ago

LÖVE + Zerobrane for IDE is my single favorite to write software that puts pixels on the screen. a few reasons why I love it -Both the IDE and the framework are lightweight enough to run comfortably even on an RPI. -The single best documentation I've ever used for any piece of development tool. Lots of examples, concise and made for max velocity. -Excellent forum with friendly people. It has taken a bit of a backseat to project Discord, which I find a bit sad. But everyone is helpful there too. -Great ecosystem of just about any library you can ask for. It has kind of spoiled software development for me. I tried getting the hang of similar technologies many times without success. Atleast now I understand the people who still go on about how great their QuickBASIC / TurboPascal workflow was back in the days. That being said there ARE a few areas in LÖVE that leave things to be desired: - I feel like the devs are a bit too trigger happy to make API changes. Though fixing a big chunk of these are a matter of a few search + replaces. - The rendering can feel oddly slow?? Especially on Android I kept bumping into weird scenarios where I felt like it should hit 60 FPS no problem, even with the Lua JIT inactive. - There aren't many resources about how to make good use of threading features to speed up common performance problems. There is definetly room for a "LÖVE2D Performance Necronomicon" to be written by someone who is more knowledgeable in CompSci fundamentals than me. :^)

dleslie 3y ago
Interesting, apparently Fennel works with Zerobrane; so I could write Lisp with LOVE. https://wiki.fennel-lang.org/Editors https://wiki.fennel-lang.org/Editors
- donio 3y ago
  You can also use Emacs and fennel-mode and then M-x fennel-repl to get a live repl from your Emacs session and then use lisp-eval-last-sexp, doc lookup and other Lisp conveniences. https://gitlab.com/alexjgriffith/min-love2d-fennel https://gitlab.com/alexjgriffith/min-love2d-fennel shows a basic setup that enables the repl too.
CodeL 3y ago
Agreed! The LÖVE community could benefit from more advanced resources, especially on performance optimization. Perhaps it's an opportunity for experienced developers to contribute.

saaspirant 3y ago

Solar2D[0] (formerly Corona SDK) is also based on Love2D. I got into programming via Corona SDK inspired by Bubble ball[1] made by a 14 y.o boy. Edit: This brings back so many memories [0]https://solar2d.com/ https://solar2d.com/ [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Ball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Ball

rstupek 3y ago
Based on Lua you mean? As far as I'm aware Solar2D has never been based on Love2D
- saaspirant 3y ago
  Oh I don't remember clearly. It has been years. I vaguely remember something like "Corona SDK uses Love2D" engine, maybe I hallucinated

Medium_Taco 3y ago

As a warning for love2D, it is very easy to get the source code, since the .love file is really just a zip that can be easily extracted

mkesper 3y ago
And that's a good thing!
- charcircuit 3y ago
  It makes it trivial to steal your code, make cheats, or bypass how you monetize your game. It's not necessarily a good thing.
- Medium_Taco 3y ago
  It is neat. But if you are considering using love for something you intend to charge for, it is probably bad. I was able to look at the source code for a steam demo that should no longer be playable, modify it to make it playable, and then make a new exe. Just something to be aware of.

alphazard 3y ago

Doesn't the umlaut seem like a bad marketing decision? Yes Unicode is cool, I'm glad we have it, I'm glad increasingly more things support it. I don't know the key combination for any character modifier off-hand, I usually copy these sorts of characters from google when I need them. It seems like it makes this framework unnecessarily harder to find.

Okx 3y ago
Not only that, but it makes the pronunciation difficult. Should this be pronounced like the English word "love", or interpreted more like a German word (which actually has this letter in the alphabet, and guess what, it isn't the same as o) and more like "loeve"? The umlaut isn't just a graphical stylisation, it's a real thing.
- lutoma 3y ago
  Yeah it's really irritating when American companies (or bands) put an Umlaut in their name but then just pronounce it like the regular letter.
  - edflsafoiewq 3y ago
    English has it's own usage of the diaeresis, unrelated to the German umlaut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)
- ginko 3y ago
  It obviously should be pronounced like løve.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
edflsafoiewq 3y ago
You don't have to type the umlaut.

nanna 3y ago

As I get older especially I find myself with less and less time to learn things that aren't somehow useful to my life, like game programming. It's sad.

minkzilla 3y ago
Take a stab at it with love. If you already code professionally you can have a simple platformer or asteriods type game up in running in an hour or two
0xdeadbeefbabe 3y ago
What things are somehow useful to your life anyway?
luxurytent 3y ago
Do you have kids? If so, learn to write a game with your code by your side! That's what I'm doing, and I generally feel the same as you (NO GODAMN TIME!) :)

jdlyga 3y ago

This is the framework used for Gravity Circuit, the Mega Man X inspired game that came out last month. It’s one of the best games of the year, by the way. I’ve been interested in exploring this framework. Glad to see it’s gotten attention on HN

Pxtl 3y ago

I love the concept of Lua, but the linguistic features always drive me up the wall. Poor FP functionality, the weird double-dipping on associative and non-associative arrays into the same data structure, and 1-based arrays all drive me batty. But I'll always gladly suffer through it in exchange for an easy and clean and secure embedding API. So yeah, I totally understand why LOVE is made like that, but I don't think I'll use it.

lucasoshiro 3y ago
Yeah, those are decisions that needed to be made in order to make Lua simple enough for being embedded. And I find its syntax very smart: it is not object-oriented, but using the : syntax sugar you can pretend it is (Löve does that); if you want to write something in a FP way, you also can do it. Of course it's not like using an OOP or FP language, but it does the job. Other cool syntax sugar is that you can omit the parentheses when calling a function that only have a string or table as a parameter, it is useful for creating simple DSLs. Lua was never meant to be the main language of anyone, but given the problem that it wants to solve, I'm amazed on how much we can do with it! On the other hand, JS was very similar to Lua. It wasn't object-oriented, but we could pretend it was, just like Lua. However, people started to use it for things that it wasn't meant to do when it was created, and it was extended with more features. Lua still have the same purpose, keeping its simple syntax. Some years ago, the creator of Lua was invited to my university. He told us about some of the decisions that were made in Lua. For example: - about it being indexed by 1: at the time, arrays indexed by 0 wasn't as popular as today. Lua was created in 1993, it is older than Java, JS and many other languages that we use today that are 0-based. A decision had to be made, and they chose to start at 1, as it was easier for non-programmers to write formulae - about it using -- as comments: it was inspired by Haskell - about it not having a ++ operator: that would increase the complexity of the syntax, and a -- operator wouldn't be possible due to that decision above
newobj 3y ago
https://typescripttolua.github.io/ https://typescripttolua.github.io/

Nuthen 3y ago

First I had an unsuccessful journey with GameMaker, then a lot of time spent modding Minecraft in middle school without really understanding how to code. Finally, LÖVE ended up becoming my main time-sink for most of my free time through high school, about a decade ago. Every evening I would start a new project. Some were random game ideas, some were to study certain aspects of math (like fractals), some were just meant to be nice to look at. This is where I learned a lot about game design, and also a lot of the harder aspects of programming (after that, my college CS degree ended up being a breeze). I was working alongside an internet friend on these. Sometimes we would collaborate on something exciting, sometimes we would work alone on something and share lots of progress updates between each other. It was a really fun time. I think LÖVE having no GUI really helped our minds to run free while we learned how powerful computers could be. Some of my LÖVE projects I remember the most fondly: - A gravity simulation / art canvas where ships would fly around planets and paint a trail behind them [1]. - An online multiplayer platformer roguelike with full rollback netcode that handles 150ms+ ping (this was a real challenge!) - never completed. - An online pseudo-rhythm game where you only have one button to use and you have to work with your friends to input in the correct order while a timer keeps ticking down [2]. The last one still lives rent free in my mind. This one still gets downloads today, it's the most popular project I've been a part of. But I suspect most players don't get past the step of needing to forward ports and find 3 friends to play a short 5 minute indie game. I'm proud of the idea behind it, but I don't have a good way to turn it into a full game without ruining the core idea. LÖVE was my tool of choice for many gamejams, it was a breeze to put together a prototype once I had gotten comfortable. Today I think I have more perspective and wish I could go back in time to see more of my 100+ prototypes to completion, instead of always finding a reason something was imperfect and not worth pursuing. Now I just don't have the same amount of energy when I get home from my software day job, I often need the time just to unwind. Lately I'm trying to push through and make gamedev a habit even if it's hard, to get back some of the joy during the days I was in love with LÖVE. Edit: Formatting [1] https://love2d.org/imgmirrur/aIkrkdBl.png?1 https://love2d.org/imgmirrur/aIkrkdBl.png?1 [2] https://ikroth.itch.io/boss-bashing-button-brawlers https://ikroth.itch.io/boss-bashing-button-brawlers

zeroCalories 3y ago
> An online multiplayer platformer roguelike with full rollback netcode that handles 150ms+ ping (this was a real challenge!) - never completed. I worked on something similar in high school(also never finished). Implementing good netcode on a novel multiplayer game can be very hard to get right. Made me a lot more forgiving of games that didn't do it well. You pretty much need to design your game with multiplayer in mind.

Der_Einzige 3y ago

An excellent sequal to the classic flash game "Mud and Blood 2" is written using the LOVE engine. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1391530/Mud_and_Blood/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1391530/Mud_and_Blood/

mahastore 3y ago

How does this framework compare to Bitty - another game engine framework which is also on todays HN first page?

liveoneggs 3y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b16rgLIf8I4&list=PLhQjrBD2T383Vx9-4vJYFsJbvZ_D17Qzh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b16rgLIf8I4&list=PLhQjrBD2T3... <- free game programming course based on love

CobrastanJorji 3y ago
Is there any language, platform, or trend that CS50 hasn't somehow managed to find?

manicennui 3y ago

If you'd like to use LOVE with a lisp, fennel can be used. https://gitlab.com/alexjgriffith/min-love2d-fennel https://gitlab.com/alexjgriffith/min-love2d-fennel

iamnotsure 3y ago

mistake vote, gc language. hn unvoting dark patterns.

newobj 3y ago

i feel obligated once again to mention TSTL, a very high quality TypeScript-to-Lua transpiler: https://typescripttolua.github.io/ https://typescripttolua.github.io/ works great. used this on a large project. works great with Love/LuaJIT too.

dang 3y ago

Related. Others? LÖVE 11.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16731397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16731397 - April 2018 (2 comments) How to make a game from scratch using Lua and Löve - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404230 - Feb 2018 (102 comments) LÖVE 0.10 released with iOS and Android support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10780579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10780579 - Dec 2015 (91 comments) Create 2D games in Lua and LÖVE. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3745631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3745631 - March 2012 (18 comments) Löve 0.7.1 (lua game framework) is released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262808 - Feb 2011 (14 comments) LÖVE 0.6.0 (lua game library) is released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1019682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1019682 - Dec 2009 (15 comments) LÖVE - a 2D game engine for rapid game development in Lua - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457129 - Jan 2009 (12 comments)

binary132 3y ago

The main thing that makes me a little sad about LÖVE is that LuaJIT is not really RISC-V friendly yet (yes I know about the fork.) I am interested in focusing on RISC-V for some personal projects so my requirements are a little unusual, but LuaJIT has a pretty high barrier to adding new backends. Usually it needs to be industrially sponsored, too. LuaJIT can also have unpredictable performance characteristics, if it matters.

nebula8804 3y ago

Oh Man I haven't heard of this framework in years! There was this amazing fan game made to mimic an episode of this tv show called Community. The show is about a group of community college students getting into all sorts of hijinks and one episode had all of them go into this video 8 bit video game world....so LÖVE was used to recreate the game exactly as you see in the show. Unfortunately it is running on a very old version at this point and I hear due to how the framework has changed upgrading is not straightforward. It interesting to see how software changes and grows over time. Fortunately the last version released still seems to work fine on modern machines. (at least it runs on my M1 Mac) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzhuvOqfmC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzhuvOqfmC4 [2]: http://projecthawkthorne.com/ http://projecthawkthorne.com/ [3]: gameplay footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imv6J8dqLyE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imv6J8dqLyE What blew me away 10 years ago was the complexity of the game that you could produce in LÖVE. its astounding!

mega_tux 3y ago

I'm trying to do something with DragonRuby Game Toolkit (Ruby is my main tool) but LÖVE always seemed nice, too. I also like Moonscript as an alternative to Lua language ( https://moonscript.org/ https://moonscript.org/ )