Love Game Engine
Contents
Download
Go to the main site for the Love engine:
The above site is not available in college so you can also download from here:
You should be able to extract these zip files into your compiled storage folder.
Getting Started
The Love game engine uses Lua, so make sure you catch up and learn the language. The link below is to the Lua wiki section, it covers all of the basics of Lua:
Making a Game
To make a minimal game:
- Create a folder for your game
- Open up your favorite text editor. Sublime Text is a pretty good one for all operating systems, and it has Lua support built in.
- Create a new file in the folder you just created, and name it main.lua.
- Put the following code in the 'main.lua' file, and save it:
function love.load()
-- use to set up your game
end
function love.update(dt)
-- dt is the elapsed time since last call
end
function love.draw()
love.graphics.print("Hello World", 400, 300)
end
You can obviously add more functions, classes, variables to make your own game. But the key sections are 'love.load()', 'love.update(dt)', and 'love.draw()'.
Running Games
Within Windows software such as ZeroBrane Studio, Sublime Text 2, Notepad++, and SciTE allow you to launch the game from within their code editors.
Otherwise, the easiest way to run the game is to drag the folder onto either love.exe or a shortcut to love.exe. Remember to drag the folder containing main.lua, and not main.lua itself.
You can create a shortcut to do this; simply make a shortcut to love.exe, right-click on it and select 'Send to Destop' to create a shortcut:
On Windows, there is a special command-line option which will attach a console to the window, allowing you to see the result of print calls. So right click your shortcut, choose 'properties', and edit the target to include '--console' eg:
"C:\Program Files\LOVE\love.exe" --console
Tutorials
TRC
External
Love Main Site
Here is the linke for the Love Wiki:
The above site is not available in college, but try this site instead (it seems to be an older version of parts of the Love wiki):
Here is the link for just the tutorials on the Love wiki site:
Awesome Love2d
Learn 2 Love
Lua Breakout/Arkanoid
Simple Game Tutorials
Harvard CS50
YouTube playlist for this course: Harvard CS50 Games Development Tutorials
GitHub for this course: GitHub for these tutorials
Using Tiled in Love
You Tube
You Tube playlists:
Game Development in Love2D [Beginner Series!]
Lets make a platformer in love2d
Game Development for Complete Beginners Tutorial Series (Using Lua and Love2d)