Beginner friendly LÖVE 2D documentation

Welcome to the beginner friendly love2d documentation. Here you'll find a group of examples and neat implementation of this beautiful game framework. Follow me in this exciting journey to becoming a game developer, put on your seatbelt and enojoy the ride. (Seriusly, please put on that seatbelt the road is a little rough).

What is LÖVE?

LÖVE is an awesome framework you can use to make 2D games in Lua. It's free, open-source, and works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android and iOS. Source: love2d.org

If you really want to know more details about this wonderful framework adn what is Lua for example go to "Is LÖVE good for me?"

Getting started

Let us begin with the basic requirements.

1. The love2d application.

2. Any text editor of choice. However, my recomendations are:

   • Sublime Text (Freemium. macOS/Windows/Linux Support).
   • Atom (Free. Open Source. macOS/Windows/Linux Support).
   • Visual Studio Code (Free. Open Source. macOS/Windows/Linux Support).
   • ZeroBraneStudio (Not really a text editor, it's an IDE. Free. Portable. Open Source. macOS/Windows/Linux Support).

   I'll be using Visual Studio Code in this guide because it would be visually easier to setup, but no matter which text editor you choose the code should run the same on any platform. Choosing a text editor is like choosing the flavour of an ice cream, at the end of the day it's a matter of preference. I'll recommend you try all of these and then choose the one that you feel more confortable using, you'll be working with it on many projects from now on.

3. Stay Organized: This is not really a requirement but more like a recommendation, allocate a folder on your Documents or Desktop to create an accesible place to work with your files. A folder named /love2d-projects should work just fine.

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Installing LÖVE

Download love2d to your desktop from the download site.

Choose the appropiate link for your current desired operating system. In my case it would be macOS, but don't worry there are no perticular differences between the two other than the way of opening the files. I'll go through the process of using both Windows and macOs versions on this quick installation process.

*At the moment of this writting the current stable version of LÖVE is 0.10.2.*

Installation Process

Once the love2d file is downloaded, installing the application is as easy as uncompressing the file and opening the application.

The application should look like the following:

Windows Instalation

Open the installer. Click on Next. Click on I agree. Now you can decide where you install LÖVE. It doesn't matter where you install LÖVE, but remember the folder. This folder will be referred to as the Installation Folder.

The recomended folder is C:/Program Files/LOVE.

Click on Next. Click on Install.

When LÖVE is done installing, click on Finish.

MacOS Installation

Go to the applications folder. Drag the Love.app to the Applications folder.

Open the love.app at least once.