Making some retro games with LÖVE

I was in the mood to make some games this past week, when I discovered the wonderfully powerful yet lightweight LÖVE game framework.

After watching some videos on YouTube highlighting games others have made*, I set to work on one of my own. Within a couple of hours I had Pong running on my phone!

I decided I’d keep exploring the APIs by building a suite of simple retro games, the source of which I’ve uploaded to a new GitHub repo named RetroLove.

So far I have decent clones of Pong and Breakout. I’m thinking maybe Asteroids next. It’s so much fun, and the framework couldn’t be easier to use.

Check it out,

/jon

*: The story on how I found LÖVE is actually a little bit longer and shows the circuitous way by which I find myself doing these kinds of projects. I was working on another project, my first Universal Windows Platform app (that is, an app that runs on all Windows 10 devices). The project itself is something I’ve had on the back-burner for years, and I was primarily using it as an excuse to practice using XAML, which is the UI framework for UWP apps. (My day-job is on the XAML team at Microsoft, so using it myself only helps me to better understand our customers.)

Anyway, my app needed an embedded scripting language, and I wanted to use Lua, but I needed something that would work within a UWP app, which, because it needs to work on lots of different kinds of devices, meant I couldn’t use the native Lua libraries easily.

This led me to the very cool MoonSharp project, which is a Lua interpreter implemented entirely in C#. After I got that up and running, the app also needed a kind of visual editor, so I needed to do some 2D graphics work. It was then that I discovered the Win2D project, which makes it easier to do GPU-powered 2D graphics within XAML.

Then an idea hit me: what if I had a 2D game engine designed similar to retro consoles? Where the engine would be responsible for maintaining backgrounds, sprites, and drawing to the screen, and the game developer would provide the game in the form of a package of Lua code and game assets? I could make a UWP app that used MoonSharp to interpret the Lua and used Win2D to draw to the screen.

It had been some 15 years since the last time I’d made a game engine. In college I made a decent Mario-style platformer in Java; it had realistic physics, collision detection, music, sprite animations, scrolling, power-ups and enemies. I only ended up making one tech-demo of a level, but in the process I learned a ton about game engine design. (Though looking at that old code now… yikes.)

I spent a weekend trying to implement my idea for a sprite-based 2D game engine for Windows 10. It took me the two days to realize the true scope of such a project, and unfortunately I couldn’t get MoonSharp and Win2D to cooperate. Knowing that my idea probably wasn’t a unique one, I started searching online for other Lua-powered 2D game engines.

That’s how I found the free and open-source LÖVE. After seeing the size of its community, and how mature it was, I quickly abandoned my own broken code and started work on Pong.