Balatro was made with LÖVE, and a lot of it like the background and score flames were made with GLSL to reduce the amount and size of assets:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/143ybxa/pixelated_high_score_shader/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/143ybxa/pixelated...</a><p>The OP mentions hot reloading and there are a couple of repos that may help with that:<p><a href="https://github.com/clofresh/love-module">https://github.com/clofresh/love-module</a><p><a href="https://github.com/usysrc/LICK">https://github.com/usysrc/LICK</a><p>Their card game prototype is really impressive for three hours' work!
To the OP, try DragonRuby for your next game if you miss hot reloading but like the scripting, code-first nature of LÖVE. It’s also cross-platform. Not sponsored, just a big fan and it scratches many of the same itches as you described with LÖVE.
I'm a big fan of Love and Lua, but one thing that always bothered me was that there's no real "great" solutions for a) cross platform/web/mobile distribution. I know there are 3rd party solutions but for as mature as the framework is, you'd think it could get a first party solution. The same goes for several API's that you'd think are core to game making, like sprite animations. There are fairly mature libraries, but I always hate having a bunch of patchwork libraries that should be included batteries instead of 3rd party boilerplate.
The article gives a sketch of three games the author built.<p>It sounds like the velocity was provided by consulting LLMs.<p>It’s fun.<p>I wonder if the creative feeling is an illusion, though. Does the fact that the LLM doesn’t feel like it is directly copying work it has ingested make the experience feel different than just ripping off a project you find on GitHub?<p>Anyway, I would be very interested in a write up that gives more details: how long did the author feel like they were “on the path” that LLM knows from existing code, vs how does it handle being “off the path”.
I'm always amazed how people like author "learn" and "build' so quickly. I recently started to dabble with unity on basics and no way on earth I can build, say something like Heartstone clone or the interaction. My background is web back end mostly.<p>Good stuff OP.
Coincidentally, I’ve been building a chess-inspired game prototype with LÖVE for a few days recently, but switched to Godot this week. Love and lua are lovely, but Godot makes so many things trivial, it’s hard to argue against the pace of development I was able to achieve.
I gave this LOVE framework a try a couple years ago, but was dissuaded by the amount of spritework needed for my game. But looking at your prototype games here, they look pretty good and playable as is.
I love LÖVE for prototyping, and am about to ship an extremely small game with it. Love.js works great to make a web build too; I host mine on the GitHub pages site for the repo. This is excellent for getting playtest help too even if you don't wanna ship it that way.<p>Over Thanksgiving break I decided to see how far I could get an LLM to do all the work (using cursor) and I picked LÖVE as a minimalist all-code framework. I put the game design and descriptions of UI and every screen in my .cursorrules file, so they are included in every prompt, and for a long while mostly told cursor in composer mode to do whatever the next thing it suggested was. I chose the smallest possible full game design I could and managed to just barely get there, although there were some brick walls where I had to help the LLM, but I got fairly far without writing or reading any code.<p>Reviewing what went wrong, the biggest problem is the LLM code started pretty good but just got worse and worse over time, especially as soon as it couldn't fit everything in its context.<p>ANYWAY, I was intending to suggest choosing the smallest possible game design you can if you wanna ship something.<p>I'm ready to ship my tiny project and it's amazing just how much work it is to ship a thing even after you've got all the functionality done.
(Off topic) Which open-source engine/framework is best in terms of cross-platform? It seems that LÖVE is desktop-only.<p>Edit: by cross-platform I mean desktop + console + mobile.
If you are looking to do VR/3d games, LÖVR (<a href="https://lovr.org/" rel="nofollow">https://lovr.org/</a>) is derived from LÖVE.
what an interesting article! outside of programming in my day I've written a few articles about guides on my blog <a href="https://playstationcouch.com/home.php" rel="nofollow">https://playstationcouch.com/home.php</a>
I have been using my engine <a href="https://github.com/willtobyte/carimbo">https://github.com/willtobyte/carimbo</a><p>Demo <a href="https://carimbo.run/play/1.0.30/willtobyte/megarick/1.0.30/720p/" rel="nofollow">https://carimbo.run/play/1.0.30/willtobyte/megarick/1.0.30/7...</a><p>You can use Lua as scripting language.