Löve In Two Dimensions

It’s a wonder. These pockets of people you can happen upon. The graphics environment is called Löve and it’s Lua and SDL glued together. So, somewhere between Pygame and Processing.

And it’s actually a rather active community with forums that are busy and full of tiny demos. It’s an attractive, fun, flippant site — which is surprisingly unusual among toolkits geared toward amateurs. (If you want to attract newbs to your site, I think you need to spend as much time on the art as you do on the code.)

Anyway, yeah, runs on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Let’s see, what else? How bout one of the creators of Löve showing how to move a potato around?

LÖVE Tutorial: Moving Around from Michael Enger on Vimeo.

The documentation is also fantastic. (Look at the one-line summaries of functions — that’s the stuff.) I mean this is a noble effort and they’re pulling it off.

Many great built-in libraries for common physics and graphics trick. Take, for example, the class wrapping sprites. Or the standard particle system.

That last one’s a good way to add explosions or steam effects to your game.

 local p = love.graphics.newParticleSystem(circle, 1000)
 p:setEmissionRate(100)
 p:setSpeed(300, 400)
 p:setGravity(0)
 p:setSize(2, 1)
 p:setColor(clr(255, 255, 255, 255), clr(58, 128, 255, 0))
 p:setPosition(400, 300)
 p:setLifetime(1)
 p:setParticleLife(1)
 p:setDirection(0)
 p:setSpread(360)
 p:setRadialAcceleration(-2000)
 p:setTangentialAcceleration(1000)
 love.graphics.draw(p, 0, 0)

In summary: A+.

Exceptional.

Does need to cool off on its use of CPU and memory. You’ll all help them fix that, right? Maybe even show them where Github is. All in all, fine fine work.