LÖVE

Hey guy's newbie to programming so forgive my ignorance if it shows.

I became interested in the Love engine because, simply being a Low end PC user I wanted to make game with great optimization that anybody could run and heard Love was great with shaping scope in that regard. The thing is though i'm an upcoming 2D animator with absolutely no experience with pixel art. After looking through the Love game list and seeing nothing but pixel art, is it possible the Love engine can't run 2D hand drawn animation? Also if it can't is it because of an optimization issue and that there is a rendering difference between pixel and drawn images?

I'm trying to balance between Aesthetic, Optimization, and Ease of Use? could someone help me out?

Thanks

Hi, and welcome!

The simple fact is, most programmers are not graphical artists, i.e. they suck at anything but pixel art. (personal experience as well)

That said, löve can do almost any kind of animation (sans 3D, though there are solutions to that as well), in that there are libs that help with playing frames of images one after another... or you can code it however you want as well.

Also, löve's minimum specs have been raised with version 0.10, regarding graphics card capabilities; some people here needed to stick with 0.9.2 because of that; just saying since you stated you have a low-end computer.

Aesthetic is something you decide on, as an artist.
Optimization is irrelevant until you see your animations tear / kill your framerate.
Ease of use is again something you decide on, as a programmer. Also heavily depends on the type of game you'd want to create.

I can write some example games having 2D animation, of sorts; Dusk: An Elysian Tail had 2D Cutscenes, and iirc everything in-game was hand-drawn as well. Battleborn had 2D cutscenes too, and the skyboxes have a very minimalistic aesthetic. Skullgirls uses hand-drawn, 60FPS movesets for its character roster, as well as background characters and basically everything.
As for löve games, Move or Die doesn't use pixel art, neither does Blue Revolver (at least partially, it's not that easy to tell).
Finally, even something like Dragon Quest could be done with love, either with pre-rendered video files, or using code to assemble your images to make them animate.

Zorg thank you so much for your reply. You answered my question perfectly. The thing is my situation is the complete opposite as I am terrible with pixel art but decent with hand drawn. The reason why I wanted low end optimization was on a personal view. I'm pretty low on funds and can't afford high end computers and I missed a slew of good games because of that. The main goal is to make a game anyone can play.

Then I would target LÖVE 0.9.2, you can port to Android and iOS too since the first ports were for 0.9.2 (not official but still stable) is not a maintained version but it guarantees support on low end machines (if you don't require features as canvas or shaders or at least provide a way to disable them). I'm one of the affected ones, my computer can be said is old, and it packs a Intel GMA 3150 without native support for OpenGL 2.1, and without quality drivers that support the requirements LÖVE 0.10.1 has. Still 0.9.2 works perfectly and I keep developing for both of them, I lament not being able to play some of the cool games people post here but well, I will someday.

About animation, what kind of animation can you draw? Framed animations? Skeletal animations? Vectorial animation? This last one is kinda tricky since there are no libs, for the others there are surely a couple of libraries that can help you

If you do your animations right you shouldn't have performance problems: reduce the size of the images as much as you can (without losing the quality you expect your game to have of course) and minimizing the number of frames required or using skeletal animation, you should keep in mind that if you reduce your frames your art needs to provide good transitions so that there is no visible stutter.

Those are my few tips, I hope you enjoy your stay and that we can see you in the forums too! Cheers

There are different animation techniques.
Keyframe animation where each frame is hand-drawn/pre-rendered takes up a lot of memory.
There is also skeletal animation where objects are made up of overlaying parts and moved around using transformations.
Most 2D games today use primarily skeletal transforms plus 'some' keyframe animations.

is it possible the Love engine can't run 2D hand drawn animation

Hand-drawn animation is difficult, redundant and requires a lot of talent.
Imagine an isometric game where you want some character to walk in 8 directions,
If you can create the animation in blender, then pre-rendering that animation from 8 angles is trivial.
Conversely, hand-drawing the same movement from 8 angles is a lot of work.

PS.I would consider 'vertex tweening' as a type of animation too.

Check out spine. It's a bit expensive but what you can do with it is amazing.
http://esotericsoftware.com/
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spi ... spine-love

I'm also not sure what you mean by hand-drawn animation. Does this qualify? https://love2d.org/wiki/Paper_Evolution