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Comment by ivanr | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to play it, but it seems to be Windows only. Any plans to support other platforms, for example macOS? FWIW, I'd probably prefer to play it on iOS if the controls are decent.

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Since the game is open source and developed with LÖVE, you can probably just download the source code, go into the root directory of the game and type 'love .' in a terminal. You need to have LÖVE installed of course.

The game might not run (rather crash) if the game uses some Windows specific dependencies.

I am also gonna add a little bit of self promotion here ...

So far I've finished one game in LÖVE, which is Paratrooper (available on macOS AppStore [0]). I have almost finished my second LÖVE game called Lethal Pongbat [1] which I will release for macOS and Windows on Steam.

I have already plans for a 3rd game that I hope to start on in the coming months and which will be a BOOM clone [2].

I learned LÖVE through the Harvard Game Programming course [3], which I can recommend anyone as a starting point into game dev. In later lessons the course also uses Unity. The course can be followed for free, but you can pay some money for some extra features.

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[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFX0FlO_g9Q

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNhn77ipGTc

[2]: https://macintoshgarden.org/games/boom

[3]: https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/cs50s-introductio...

> The game might not run (rather crash) if the game uses some Windows specific dependencies.

It links against Steam, so you'll need to make that available to avoid the crash, but that seems to be the only part of the code that wouldn't work out-of-box on other platforms.

Can't you link against the macOS or Linux version of Steam libraries?

Yes. It's the same API - you'll just need to do that linking yourself, because the build scripts assume Windows.

Since it has requirements for steam here a quick hack to get it working without https://gist.github.com/BlackLotus/164cbdd2352adc6c67d807a13...

Tried getting it to work with lutro (the libretro love implementation), but didn't get too far (am too lazy). But if someone gets it working with lutro you can play it on nearly any platform (every platform with retroarch and lutro so nearly every 32/64bit platform you can imagine)

It's an open source project, and the engine supports Mac OS, though Apple being Apple you can only target any of their platforms by investing in their overpriced hardware.

You realize you're on hacker news, right? Anyone with the right machine can fork it, strip out the Steam integration and ship it on your preferred platform.

Yeah, I realise I could do that. But I'd prefer to just play the game and reward the author financially for the convenience.

Maybe he would like to see it supported for Linux on Steam and perhaps send the creator a little cash as well?

LÖVE works well on Wine.

LÖVE works well natively on Linux.

Ancedotally, LÖVE software written for Windows can be hard to get running natively on Linux properly.

Hence the cash motivation for real support.

Just to be clear I want to give cash even if it takes no effort to get it working on Linux.

You don't need any apple build tools for this. The engine is an application that reads lua files you edit to make your game. Then you can repackage all that as an application.

From the Love2D documentation [1]:

> Compiling Mac apps requires a Mac running macOS with XCode installed

Same for iOS.

[1] https://love2d.org/wiki/Game_Distribution

There's an easier way: create a zip file with all your .lua files, and just drag the zip file into the LOVE app (which you can download from the website). This isn't for distribution and more for game testing, but it works perfectly fine.

For distribution on the mac store, yes. But you can make stand alone builds by including a main.lua (and other code) next to the Love executable inside of the application (you can just make a copy of it for your game).

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