LÖVE

I'm thinking about starting a medium-to-large project on the love engine, but all the game examples I've seen around are quick, simple demos and stuff. I have not seen any 'pretentious' project on this platform, but I haven't seen any crippling limitations on the engine itself either, so I thought I could ask you this: Is LÖVE a good option for a 'professional' project or should I try something else?

I may be biased, but I don't think there's any reason it couldn't be used - LÖVE doesn't have any real gaping holes in its functionality that I can think of. The one possible issue is performance - there's a penalty, albeit not a large one, associated both with using an interpreted language (though Lua's super fast as far as interpreted languages go) and crossing the Lua<->C++ bridge.

If you do find your game not running up to par performance-wise, you can try one of the experimental LuaJIT builds, which should help significantly if you're doing a lot of computation on the Lua end of things.

I think the main reason you don't see a lot of huge games with Löve is simply that it's not all that well known. It certainly has a bit of a hobby feel to it I guess, but nothing that should prevent a more serious project from using it. Löve performs better than Game Maker in my experience and GM is used for some pretty big, if unprofessional projects.

Most people here work on small projects of one or two people. I think the major limiting factor here is time available to the average LOVE user, I don't believe anyone uses LOVE to make a living quite yet. That's not to say that it's impossible to get 20 people together and make a large scale project, it just hasn't been done.

Many of the senior members here have jobs and other obligations outside of LOVE, as well as most of the really good programmers. If it weren't for me being unemployed right now I would not have nearly the time I do to work on my small projects.

I have heard of LÖVE being used professionally, but then as a prototyping engine, rather actually releasing a LÖVE game.

Although, depending on your definition of "professional", bartbes and nevon have released a game (Volley Brawl) which is sold in the Ubuntu Software Center.

Robin wrote:"professional", bartbes and nevon

Those are some words I never expected to see in the same sentence.

As for professionals making use of LÖVE, I know that it's being used by Relentless Software as a prototyping tool.

xeol wrote:I'm thinking about starting a medium-to-large project on the love engine, but all the game examples I've seen around are quick, simple demos and stuff. I have not seen any 'pretentious' project on this platform, but I haven't seen any crippling limitations on the engine itself either, so I thought I could ask you this: Is LÖVE a good option for a 'professional' project or should I try something else?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gunfudeadlands/

Was featured on ByteJacker. I'd say that's a successful Löve game.

It's not the "engine". It's the idea. If you have an idea, make a game! Löve is a very fast development environment with the ability to draw and calculate a lot of stuff every frame.

You won't find many easier to use cross-platform environments like this if you actually want to code it yourself. Sure, you could use Game Maker if you want to, but I love Löve.

Jasoco wrote:

xeol wrote:I'm thinking about starting a medium-to-large project on the love engine, but all the game examples I've seen around are quick, simple demos and stuff. I have not seen any 'pretentious' project on this platform, but I haven't seen any crippling limitations on the engine itself either, so I thought I could ask you this: Is LÖVE a good option for a 'professional' project or should I try something else?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gunfudeadlands/

Was featured on ByteJacker. I'd say that's a successful Löve game.

It's not the "engine". It's the idea. If you have an idea, make a game! Löve is a very fast development environment with the ability to draw and calculate a lot of stuff every frame.

You won't find many easier to use cross-platform environments like this if you actually want to code it yourself. Sure, you could use Game Maker if you want to, but I love Löve.

Game Maker isn't quite cross-platform yet, although it does support Mac now. Partially.

The engine is ok for big projects. It has some sore points right now (slow font rendering, issues with non-ogg sound file formats), but they are being ironed out. Some people don't like the fact that the file format isn't encrypted, so it is (relatively) easy to get the original source code and/or art from the executable. Others don't like the fact that it is 2d only.

Don't take this the wrong way, but the biggest issue for creating a big game is usually a hardware problem. More precisely, the hardware that connects the chair to the keyboard. Once that part is good, the other part pretty much solves itself.

The community is also great. You are pretty much guaranteed to get help if you get stuck.

kikito wrote:Some people don't like the fact that the file format isn't encrypted, so it is (relatively) easy to get the original source code and/or art from the executable.

I've been meaning to ask, has there been any consideration of using zip passwords somehow to alleviate this? It seems like even a small gesture would help reassure potential Lovers that they can control their source (even if it's not the case at all).