One of the biggest recent indie hits, Balatro, was made in Löve!
I really like it, the developer experience is so smooth for beginners, just drag a zip onto the exe and it starts. And the APIs are simple enough to memorize while allowing pretty cool rendering stuff.
Game developers sometimes make the “randomness” favor the player, because of how we perceive randomness and chance.
For example in Sid Meier’s Memoir, this is mentioned.
Quoting from a review of said book:
> People hate randomness: To placate people's busted sense of randomness and overdeveloped sense of fairness, Civ Revolutions had to implement some interesting decisions: any 3:1 battle in favor of human became a guaranteed win. Too many randomly bad outcomes in a row were mitigated.
The original link being discussed in that thread is 404 now, but archived copies of the original link exist such as for example https://archive.is/8eVqt
I love LÖVE. For me it sits at the perfect intersection between high and low level abstraction. Unfortunately the latest released version is getting pretty long in the tooth now and a lot of devs use the latest HEAD from the repo since it has better performance and compatibility. One day the mythical 12.0 will get released for real…..
The Lua source code is also a masterclass in C, I recommend it to anyone learning that language. It's big enough to be an involved implementation, but small and focused and well-organized enough to (at least roughly) understand what's going on at the various layers. It's a very solidly-written mass of portable C, with only minor exceptions.
Is Love2D a decent option for gamedev compared to Godot? I finished a really simple game using Unity3D and it was fun, but it sucks to use a closed source engine.
Löve on the other hand is 100% just code. You'll not have the gui things and the pletora of different components that go with them. Still gives you freedom. Just too much freedom and not as much helpful preset tools.
How is it supposed to be pronounced? Is it just gratuitous diacritics? Or should I pronounce it in my native Swedish (where the names makes me think of leaves rather than love)?
(Throwing diacritics on English words look extremely silly to me, since I know how åäö are supposed to be pronounced. It makes something like Motorhead just sound laughable rather than metal.)
Btw, Love2D is based on SDL2. If you hate Lua but needs the same cross-platform capabilities, you can use an SDL2 binding in other languages or make your own.
It is easy to get Lua (with LuaJIT) working with SDL3, though.
That obviously isn't a replacement for the framework but it is perfectly doable if someone just wants to write a game in Lua with minimal overhead.
Edit: I mention LuaJIT specifically because it lets you create metaclasses around C objects, which is much easier than messing with the Lua stack from C, and it's easy to make a 2d vector class from an SDL Point or a spritesheet or what have you. There are a few rough edges like dealing with pointers and gc but to me it's the best of both worlds (the speed of C, and some implicit type checking, and the flexibility of Lua.)
Obviously you could do it the hard way and the other way around with normal modern Lua but it's such a pain in the ass.
My2c. Fintech tech lead who has only a far memory of hand coding games ages ago. Community makes tech awesome. Love2D discord changed my life. Never met a more awesome and welcoming community in my whole life.
As someone that used to write 2D games with things like phaserjs, sdl and even directx7, I always regret I never tried Löve2d. I think Android and iOS packaging was also supported. Is this still the case? What if one wants to integrate IAP?
Am I really the first one to mention pico8 in this thread? Anyway, pico8 is another option that has a bit different spin, but you also implement the games in Lua :)
TIC-80 is a nice free as in freedom alternative to PICO-8, and it allows more inputs, which makes for better Tetris games (gotta have that hold piece).
I've used this for many projects that are still working to this day.
That said, i'm not impressed. A web-based solution is usually better performing, despite all the bloatware necessary. This says a lot about the state of software development unfortunately.
They are saying web based solutions often out perform LÖVE, even though you would expect the opposite because LÖVE doesn't have the bloat of a browser engine.
I haven't tried Löve, but I somehow enjoyed reading through the README.md, no AI slop, just a natural writing style with tiny indictors showing the authors' enthusiasm in creating software.
I really like it, the developer experience is so smooth for beginners, just drag a zip onto the exe and it starts. And the APIs are simple enough to memorize while allowing pretty cool rendering stuff.
I once checked if the odds stated on a card were implemented wrong. Turns out no, the code checks out, I'm just that unlucky.
For example in Sid Meier’s Memoir, this is mentioned.
Quoting from a review of said book:
> People hate randomness: To placate people's busted sense of randomness and overdeveloped sense of fairness, Civ Revolutions had to implement some interesting decisions: any 3:1 battle in favor of human became a guaranteed win. Too many randomly bad outcomes in a row were mitigated.
https://smus.com/books/sid-meiers-memoir/
Some threads on randomness and perceived fairness in video games can be found here on HN too, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19399044
The original link being discussed in that thread is 404 now, but archived copies of the original link exist such as for example https://archive.is/8eVqt
I've long been suspicious of the RNG/seed implementation.. but not curious enough to automate testing of it, though.
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/by-name/ba...
I wrote half a blog post when I did the derivation. One day, I should finish it and post it here.
Maybe because you can fit the whole language spec on a single sheet of paper and adding more advanced features is pretty easy.
Love looks really cool. I never got into it personally but I still might
Thanks for the tip. That should make for a fun weekend
Löve on the other hand is 100% just code. You'll not have the gui things and the pletora of different components that go with them. Still gives you freedom. Just too much freedom and not as much helpful preset tools.
https://stabyourself.net/mari0/
(Throwing diacritics on English words look extremely silly to me, since I know how åäö are supposed to be pronounced. It makes something like Motorhead just sound laughable rather than metal.)
Author is currently building version 12 which will be using SDL3. But it's been in development for quite some time with no clear end date afaik.
That obviously isn't a replacement for the framework but it is perfectly doable if someone just wants to write a game in Lua with minimal overhead.
Edit: I mention LuaJIT specifically because it lets you create metaclasses around C objects, which is much easier than messing with the Lua stack from C, and it's easy to make a 2d vector class from an SDL Point or a spritesheet or what have you. There are a few rough edges like dealing with pointers and gc but to me it's the best of both worlds (the speed of C, and some implicit type checking, and the flexibility of Lua.)
Obviously you could do it the hard way and the other way around with normal modern Lua but it's such a pain in the ass.
Also move or die is running on love2d, which is an awesome game.
Also I love that trick that you can just zip your files and binary Comcast them to the love2d binary and it will load it.
That said, i'm not impressed. A web-based solution is usually better performing, despite all the bloatware necessary. This says a lot about the state of software development unfortunately.