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Comment by OmarShehata | Hacker News Reader

I made one of the first big commercially successful games with with LÖVE (Move or Die - https://moveordiegame.com/). Highly enjoyed it.

We had a devblog, doesn't exist anymore unfortunately. The thing I enjoyed the most was the flexibility of Lua, and the whole framework seemed to adopt that mindset. It gave you all the core pieces you need it (audio, input, physics, rendering), and then got out of your way.

The drawback to the full flexibility is having to spend time thinking about what design & workflow your wanted (but, really, wasn't a drawback, that's what I wanted, just took more time). We ended up designing a really flexible engine that allowed us to pivot from a 2D puzzle platformer with a story (Concerned Joe) to the action packed fast multiplayer game that Move or Die became.

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What was the URL of the devblog? It's probably on the WayBack Machine: https://web.archive.org

I'm more curious why would one delete such blog in the first place. I know this game is a little bit old, but they still maintain their website(s).

Yeah. I'm of the school of though that thinks nearly all web content should be preserved at it's original url. Wayback is a godsend but it should be a last resort.

My guess would be one of the main causes of this is "can't be arsed to migrate Wordpress." I've done that and it's surprisingly straightforward (with a plugin), but I guess FTPing a folder involves less mental steps (so has a lower "activation energy".)

probably this: https://thoseawesomeguys.com/devblog/

which still seems to be up: https://thoseawesomeguys.com/party-mode-4-polish-score-scree...

I see a few snapshots of it on the web archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20200101000000*/https://thoseawe...

I also found this, though it didn't archive super well: http://web.archive.org/web/20190329105713/http://moveordiega...

oh that definitely makes more sense

Off-topic, but your username reminded me of the episode of The Office (yes, the UK one, it's the only one that exists) where Neil (the manger from the Swindon office) brings in a home baked cake. Everybody loves it. David said "I prefer a flan"

How did you go about supporting all those platforms? How much did LÖVE help with/hinder that aspect?

That's a really interesting question. I created some small games with Löve and really loved it. However I always found the whole packaging/distribution/deployment a bit of a problematic topic.

If you don't just want to distribute a .love file (e.g. you do not want your user to get the Löve runtime themselves) this was basically unsupported and you had to come up with your own solutions..

I still think if the Löve community could improve this part it would help the most.

Someone should solve this with a Javascript app in an electron wrapper

oh god, no. Please stop trying to push javascript (and your damned node packages) into everything. There are community tools to package LÖVE games for win/mac/linux.

It's possible I'm taking it the wrong way, but I think their comment was meant facetiously.

(grabs holy water, garlic, and a crucifix)

(The JS runtime doesn't make it past the salt line while the WASM modules do, causing the the app runtime to fail to find critical exports and go into an infinite loop which persists after Chrome is closed because boot was managed by a service worker)

There are some packaging tools that help with distribution (like https://github.com/pfirsich/makelove/ - I made this). What would you like improved?

Nice work. How did you go about app signing on macOS? It's a big issue making something that doesn't launch like the antichrist built it.

If it's supported, or not, documentation is king!

There is nothing built-in for it per se. I think you just have to sign the application from a postbuild hook, I think. I remember discussing this with the person that contributed the Mac build, but I don't remember the result of the discussion exactly. I think that was it though.

That looks very interesting. Thanks for creating and sharing. This wasn't available back when I used Löve. Maybe I should give it another shot. I will certainly try your tool!

Why don't you want to distribute the love runtime + .love file to your users?

Less polished, and more steps. People want to download a game. Not a patchwork of files and runtimes. It doesn't feel "productioney".

But you can distribute e.g. a zip file with both the run time and data in it, can't you? How is that any different from how any other game is distributed?

Fair point.

Do people even have to know? I’d anyway these days distribute via itch or steam

You can use steam to install runtimes with install scripts [0]

[0] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/installscripts

How to do that exactly to make the user click and run the application without a second thought?

I'll throw in my 3c, it was 2016 and I've been trying to create a fully static x86-64 Linux binary, to hopefully avoid all the problems with DLL hell (as Löve links to an awful lot of stuff, and judging by the .so numbers it was unlikely to work in a year or two). TL;DR I've spent more time fighting the linker than writing the actual games ;)

I didn't want to rely on whatever-version-of-löve-this-distro-has-packaged because Löve at the time would break API compat quite frivolously. You can probably use an AppImage these days but I think this goes against the intent and spirit of Löve. It should be trivial to build entirely self-contained binaries; and in case of Windows/Mac, it was indeed the case (modulo code signing).

If you don’t mind me asking, how big was your development team?

Have this game. Love it! It's a great pick up and play couch game.

It's impressive to see the versatility of LÖVE in action. Flexibility can be both a blessing and a challenge, but it's clear you made the most of it with 'Move or Die'.

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