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.
KeplerBoy 3 hours ago [-]
Balatro ships with the entire unobfuscated Lua source by the way.
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.
__s 3 hours ago [-]
too bad universe doesn't ship with unobfuscated source so that you could see whether you're unlucky, or just skill issue
Tepix 2 hours ago [-]
The source is right there, you just have to grok it.
brooke2k 2 hours ago [-]
hahaha, I did the exact same thing after the game came out to see if wheel of fortune was really a 1/4 chance
mh- 2 hours ago [-]
lol, love seeing that I'm not the only one who did this. Being suspicious of WoF was the first and last time I peeked at the Balatro source.
QuantumNomad_ 54 minutes ago [-]
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
lovehashbrowns 44 minutes ago [-]
The 8-ball joker is even more BS. I think I’ve only seen it trigger once ever.
mh- 41 minutes ago [-]
I've read the source a few years back. It's all implemented fairly as it says on the tin.
I've long been suspicious of the RNG/seed implementation.. but not curious enough to automate testing of it, though.
sfn42 14 minutes ago [-]
I didn't know I could check but after losing like 20 times in a row I just stopped taking WoF. Never saw the good outcome.
Levitating 33 minutes ago [-]
Not on steam does it? I can only see the exe and dlls.
jared0x90 17 minutes ago [-]
extract the exe like a zip file, that's how love packages itself. last i looked at the source myself it had comments in still from the dev
Levitating 15 minutes ago [-]
yep that works
Neywiny 11 minutes ago [-]
Haven't used it in almost 10 years but at least back then one sticky point was that unlike unity and the like, opening the exe didn't open an IDE. Just kind of a dummy window. Also building for Mac from Windows was a nightmare since my end user was not technically literate and it didn't just run on their end. But that's likely just a Mac issue
bsimpson 1 hours ago [-]
In case you're curious, here's a Nix derivation to make Balatro for any other system playable on Linux:
I wrote half a blog post when I did the derivation. One day, I should finish it and post it here.
wwarren 3 hours ago [-]
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…..
3 hours ago [-]
PacificSpecific 2 hours ago [-]
I generally very much dislike dynamic languages but for some reason I've always really liked Lua. I'm not exactly sure why to be honest.
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
turtledragonfly 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
PacificSpecific 29 minutes ago [-]
Oh I hadn't considered looking at the source but considering how minimal and clean Lua is I should have assumed so :)
Thanks for the tip. That should make for a fun weekend
I looove stabyourself. ortho robot was amazing. you know what, let me install again.. here goes my night.
jgtrosh 1 hours ago [-]
I like the Trosh game
ranger_danger 1 hours ago [-]
How have they not been sued by Nintendo yet?
mid-kid 8 minutes ago [-]
Same reason all the other mario flash games haven't, not a critical enough mass.
raincole 3 hours ago [-]
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.
onehair 18 minutes ago [-]
Now why would you hate lua of all things?
raincole 5 minutes ago [-]
For all the reasons, but the 1-based index alone makes me uncomfortable.
newobj 2 hours ago [-]
SDL3
jasonjmcghee 2 hours ago [-]
Definitely SDL2.
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.
krapp 1 hours ago [-]
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.
raincole 2 hours ago [-]
As far as I know only the latest (unstable) version uses SDL3.
alprado50 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
onehair 19 minutes ago [-]
Godot will be familiar to you if you then.
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.
K0IN 2 hours ago [-]
I love löve I did some projects in it, lua was one of my fist programming language, i think it's a great fit for game dev.
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.
0xCAP 3 hours ago [-]
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.
p2detar 3 hours ago [-]
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?
VorpalWay 21 minutes ago [-]
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.)
nout 1 hours ago [-]
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 :)
opan 29 minutes ago [-]
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).
herczegzsolt 3 hours ago [-]
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.
actuallyalys 2 minutes ago [-]
I don’t usually push LÖVE to its limits because I tend to make simple games as a hobby but I do keep an eye on its framerate and often it‘s in the 100s of frames per second. So it may not be impressive (in sense of winning benchmarks) but it’s rarely perceivably slow.
small_scombrus 3 hours ago [-]
It isn't web based? It's a set of Lua scripts that run locally
squeaky-clean 2 hours ago [-]
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.
usrnm 2 hours ago [-]
Browser engines are probably some of the most optimized pieces of software in existence, so it doesn't surprise me at all.
wiseowise 6 minutes ago [-]
Explain this to electron haters.
davidkunz 2 hours ago [-]
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.
marcomezzavilla 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 22:42:53 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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
https://stabyourself.net/mari0/
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.