Best Libraries for Platformer?

[binaryeye]

A couple years ago, I was using LÖVE (0.9.1) to develop a platformer but stopped working on it. I'd like to resume working on it using 0.10.0. I had been using Tiled and STI for level management and bump for collision. Would this still be the ideal approach? My game is a side-view platformer with fixed screens (e.g. Knytt) and relatively simple collision (axis-aligned rectangles, no rotation, slopes, etc.).

Thanks for any input!

[Doctory]

The libraries you are using right now are good. No need to use anything else.

[bobbyjones]

Yea those are wonderful libraries should be able to get a prototype done relatively quickly.

[aloisdeniel]

All libraries from kikito are f*ckin' great :

• https://github.com/kikito/middleclass : OOP
• https://github.com/kikito/stateful.lua : managing states
• https://github.com/kikito/anim8 : sprites animations
• https://github.com/kikito/tween.lua : smooth transitions with predefined tweening functions
• https://github.com/kikito/gamera : camera with simple rotation, zoom and translation

Löve their simplicity and how really specific each job and only it is done. Really well designed !

[kikito]

Hi, thanks a lot for your kind words! If I may, let me plug in inspect.lua as well. I find it incredibly useful for debugging.

[s-ol]

I've been using bump, sometimes gamera, my own state library (st8.lua), STI and anim8 mostly, plus rxi's flux for tweening but that's not really platformer-specific.

[bobbyjones]

I think if you will be doing a lot of animation and a lot of entities anim8 may not be the best. Iirc it does not support spritebatches.

[kikito]

I think if you will be doing a lot of animation and a lot of entities anim8 may not be the best. Iirc it does not support spritebatches.

I have read this complain before, but I don't understand what "supporting spritebatches" mean. bobbyjones, since I don't want to derail this thread, would you mind opening an issue on the anim8 repo, explaining what are you trying to accomplish, exactly? I will try to help.

[binaryeye]

Thanks for the reassurance and suggestions.

My game will likely have only four states (start menu, game, pause, and end), which shouldn't be too difficult to handle. The animation will be relatively simple (no more than ~16 frames for all PC movements, ~4 frames for each NPC), but I might try anim8.

One thing I forgot to ask about is particle systems. I know LÖVE has a particle system but I've never used it. Does it support animated particles? The documentation doesn't seem to indicate it does. In the past, I've simply used sprites to generate my own "particles" but I assume using an actual particle system is more efficient. Most of my particles will be static 1x1 pixels but some will be 4x4 or 8x8 with 2-4 frames of animation.

[bobbyjones]

binaryeye I think it does support it.