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Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

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Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#51

Post by cloud-oak »

occz wrote: post #49
edflsafoiewq wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficulty of porting to mobile is generally changing the UI to work well on a small touchscreen.

The desktop UI actually worked pretty much fine on mobile, to be honest. I ran it for a while using the porting methods available from the desktop binaries to an APK. The mobile UI basically just changes the interactions from a small button on the card to a drag-bases UI, which is slightly better on mobile.

The funny thing is that the original Desktop UI is still in the Android version. Sometimes I'll get jokers/consumables stuck in the desktop's "selected" mode, where the tiny sell/use buttons pop out underneath. So the whole drag-n-drop thing seems to have been added on top of the original ui, and sometimes the old ui events still fire.

Example: https://i.postimg.cc/P5VrVhQ4/Screenshot-20250101-103921.png

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#52

Post by the_gipsy »

aquova wrote: post #10
modernerd wrote: post #5

Balatro was made with LÖVE, and a lot of it like the background and score flames were made with GLSL to reduce the amount and size of assets: https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/143ybxa/pixelated... The OP mentions hot reloading and there are a couple of repos that may help with that: https://github.com/clofresh/love-module https://github.com/usysrc/LICK Their card game prototype is really impressive for three…

Balatro recently published a mobile version of their game, but I was under the impression Love2D only supported desktop platforms. Has that changed?

I downloaded a mobile version before the official release (I uad bought it on steam already). Somebody made an apk with some löve-to-apk generator, and one or two fixes for the shaders on mobile.

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#53

Post by dartharva »

pull_my_finger wrote: post #46

I'm a big fan of Love and Lua, but one thing that always bothered me was that there's no real "great" solutions for a) cross platform/web/mobile distribution. I know there are 3rd party solutions but for as mature as the framework is, you'd think it could get a first party solution. The same goes for several API's that you'd think are core to game making, like sprite animations. There are fairly mature libraries, but…

Balatro is available on Android though?

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#55

Post by KeplerBoy »

cableshaft wrote: post #27
KeplerBoy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you need an Ad framework and achievements? Isn't balatro a prime example of a game simply being a paid app? No ads, no bullshit. Just a game and a pricetag.

Balatro doesn't have ads but it does have achievements and game center. As much as I'd like my game to spread as far and wide as Balatro, I understand that it won't, not anywhere close. It's just not going to have the polish that Balatro has (I don't have the time or energy, I'm in my 40s with a spouse and a day job). But hopefully it will be fun to play (it is a more fully-featured remake of an old free web game I m…

Sure, making money with games is hard and I guess you have to have ads unless you strike it big. I just wish mobile gaming went a different way, but that's not the world we live in.

Best of luck to you and your project.

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#56

Post by occz »

cloud-oak wrote: post #51
occz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The desktop UI actually worked pretty much fine on mobile, to be honest. I ran it for a while using the porting methods available from the desktop binaries to an APK. The mobile UI basically just changes the interactions from a small button on the card to a drag-bases UI, which is slightly better on mobile.

The funny thing is that the original Desktop UI is still in the Android version. Sometimes I'll get jokers/consumables stuck in the desktop's "selected" mode, where the tiny sell/use buttons pop out underneath. So the whole drag-n-drop thing seems to have been added on top of the original ui, and sometimes the old ui events still fire. Example: https://i.postimg.cc/P5VrVhQ4/Screenshot-20250101-103921.png

Yep, I've noticed this as well.

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#57

Post by d3VwsX »

aquova wrote: post #10
modernerd wrote: post #5

Balatro was made with LÖVE, and a lot of it like the background and score flames were made with GLSL to reduce the amount and size of assets: https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/143ybxa/pixelated... The OP mentions hot reloading and there are a couple of repos that may help with that: https://github.com/clofresh/love-module https://github.com/usysrc/LICK Their card game prototype is really impressive for three…

Balatro recently published a mobile version of their game, but I was under the impression Love2D only supported desktop platforms. Has that changed?

Yes, https://www.love2d.org/ has links to both iOS and Android SDKs.

For Android you can also install the stand-alone LÖVE Loader app that can open .love files to play. Some games on itch.io comes with a .love-download (in addition to platform-specific executables), but I guess they can sometimes be extracted from other games too.

The .love-files, if provided or if they can be extracted from a game, are also useful on desktop, for playing the games in an operating system (like FreeBSD) that the game's developer did not provide binaries for.

The stand-alone app is also a fun way to do some gamedev on an Android phone. The .love file is just a ZIP, so it can be easily created from termux.

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#58

Post by hiccuphippo »

valcron1000 wrote: post #37
raincole wrote: post #34

(Off topic) Which open-source engine/framework is best in terms of cross-platform? It seems that LÖVE is desktop-only. Edit: by cross-platform I mean desktop + console + mobile.

Probably Monogame, a C# framework that supports Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, iPadOS, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch

Don't some of them have proprietary APIs under NDA? how can an open source project support them? I ask because this is one of the criticisms towards Godot when compared to Unity.

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#59

Post by d3VwsX »

trevorhinesley wrote: post #41
jasonhr13 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prototyped a game in a few frameworks/engines, namely: Godot, GMS, Defold, Love, and DragonRuby. I ended up sticking with DR because I found the api the most intuitive, and because I’m a career ruby dev and just can’t get myself to enjoy Lua. I find DR and Love to both be fantastic for those who just want to code.

Preach! Similar experience here. Agreed on Lua too. Love that some people dig Lua; to each their own, it’s just not for me.

I never was a big fan of Lua and that was something that kept me from looking closer at Löve, but a few months ago I discovered fennel (Lisp-like that transpiles to Lua) and that you can use that to write Löve games.

This looks like an up-to-date introduction:

https://itch.io/jam/love2d-jam-2024/topic/3484009/getting-st...

The "absolutely minimal Löve 2D fennel" repo was useful to me as I found the other templates a bit bloated (but possibly those are more useful for real-world projects beyond small experiments?):

https://sr.ht/~benthor/absolutely-minimal-love2d-fennel/

I did find that startup-time was bad for Fennel om some very low-end devices, or when running even a small game using LoveDOS in DOSBox, so I set up my test-projects to pre-compile the fennel-code to Lua as part of building the .love-files and that solved that problem.

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#60

Post by p2detar »

Pufferbo wrote: post #50
p2detar wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a full-blown game engine and you can do A LOT with it. I've created several js games with it and it never let me down. I've never tried using it with ts, but it should be even better. edit: Just wanted to add that Phaser has one of the best docs out there including a library of tons of examples that can really get one going.

How does it compare to Pixiljs?

I think it actually uses Pixijs for rendering. Phaser is a game engine with lots of tools including audio, physics, scenes, tiled support, etc., while pixi is a graphics renderer lib.
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