LÖVE

Hi all! I started fiddling with Love2D about a month ago, and I'm really in love with it. I made a small score attack browser game to get started. You can play it right here! A couple friends have already gotten really impressive scores.

I wrote about making the game on my blog. The short version is that I've been making games in higher-level editors like Game Maker, RPGMaker, Twine, etc. for a decade, and it feels really exciting and cool to finally try out an all-code environment and immediately click with it. I've started work on a much more ambitious project, and I'm having a blast working on it so far.

I jumped into Love2D specifically because it's the framework my friend Toby used to make the engine for our collab game Nymph's Tower (which is substantially bigger and more impressive than Beach Balls). I only did level design work for that game in Ogmo, but the code I looked at didn't look tooooo scary or intimidating. I'm glad I finally took the leap!

I'm interested in what other engines and frameworks y'all have tried. How do they compare with Love2D for you?

The browser version doesn't load for me and for some reason none of your download links work. The "Thanks for downloading" box appears but nothing is downloaded. I tried a different itch.io page and that worked fine.

Edit: Apparently I'd declined some cookies that allow the browser version to work. That's working now, the downloads still don't though.

The cookie thing is a known issue with lovejs, documented here. As far as I can tell there's no way around it, lovejs just requires a certain cookie to run correctly, so declining cookies or using private browsing modes causes it to break. I realized this wasn't just me doing something wrong when I tested Sheepolution's new snake game in private browsing mode and saw it had the same issue (although their version has a snazzy in-game error message which I appreciate).

The download links work fine for me and several friends across multiple browsers, no clue what could be the issue there. Maybe it's an antivirus thing.