Ancient Love

A code-first framework for building love2d games in typescrip utilizing the amazing typescript2lua.

Note: ancient-love is still a work-in-progress.

...may your games built with love last centuries.

Roadmap

These are the modules which are completed

• logging
• scene
• ECS
• timer
• signals
• Observables
• camera via Cam11
• tween via flux
• color
• GLSL shader syntax highlighting
• collision system
• debugger (this partially works)
• controller / input mapping
• advanced collisions
• curved geometries / lerp'd things
• UI
• Sound Mixer

Github action

• https://github.com/marketplace/actions/love-build

Not included, for now

• animations
• bones / splines
• Documentation

Getting Started

1. Create a new empty directory for your game, and cd into it
2. Run npm create ancient-love in the new directory
3. Run npm install
4. Run code -n . to open a new VSCode window into the directory
5. Install the suggested extensions
6. Configure your game by editing game.json and src/conf.ts

All together:

mkdir my_game_name
cd my_game_name
npm create ancient-love
npm install
code -n .

Developing your game

Use npm run dev to watch for typescript file changes within src. it will output to the build directory.

Building your game

Use npm run build to build your game, once.

Running your built game

You can run the game via npm run love, or love ./build. There are VSCode tasks available by default for running your game.

Hot Module Replacement (HMR)

You can use HMR via npm run hmr.

Having one shell running npm run dev and another running npm run hmr could be a very good workflow!

Note: Hot module replacement mostly works but isn't perfect. Figure it functions by reloading changed lua files in your love game—so expect the idempotent-ness code of that file to determine how easily it can be re-ran.

Packaging your game

Note that packaging is a script that automates the steps from love2d.org's Game Distribution page (with some pretty output). So, if you run into errors, want to understand it, or want to manually build—that's there for you.

Prerequisites

1. Make sure your game is first built via npm run build.

2. Make sure your game.json has the correct configuration (values for game_name, and the platforms you want to build for are filled-in)

3. Run npm run love:build to build for your platforms listed in game.json

   • You can also pass specific overrides to this script: npm run love:build -- game_version=alpha to build a game with the version "alpha".
   • By default the version is the value of game_version in game.json, or the checksum of the ./build directory

4. Check dist for the related files to be distributed