LÖVE Game Development & Automated Build System

Turn your LÖVE game ideas into polished multi-platform releases with this powerful template! Featuring professional IDE integration, automated builds, and everything you need to go from prototype to published game. Built for LÖVE 💕

Features

• 🗂️ Organized with Workspaces
  • 🌕 Rich Lua language features with Lua Language Server
  • 🐛 Debugging with Local Lua Debugger
  • 🩷 Intellisense for the LÖVE API
  • 👨‍💻 Consistent coding styles with Editorconfig
  • ️⛱️ Shader languages support
  • 🐙 GitHub Local Actions
  • ️👷 Automated builds of the .love file from within the IDE
• 📦 GitHub Actions for automated builds - compatible with act
  • 🤖 Android (.aab and .apk)
  • 📱 iOS (.ipa)
  • 🌐 HTML5
  • 🐧 Linux (.AppImage and tarball)
  • 🍏 macOS (App bundle and .dmg Disk Image)
  • 🪟 Windows (.exe and .zip)
  • 🎮 Automatic publishing to itch.io
• ️⚙️ Shared product configuration between the game and the GitHub Actions
• ️❄️ Nix flake to provision a dev shell

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio Code or VSCodium
• LÖVE 11.5 (currently only 11.5 is supported)
  • love should be in your PATH
• bash
• 7z
• miniserve (optional ️for local testing of web builds)

Quick Start

Use this template to create a new repository for your game, then clone that repository locally.

• Open the Workspace.code-workspace file with Visual Studio Code or VSCodium
  • You will be prompted that there are recommended extensions.
    • Click 'Install'
• Replace game/main.lua with your game's code.
• Configure game/product.env and game/conf.lua with the settings specific to your game.
  • Disable any platforms you do not want to target.
  • Full details on configuration can be found in the USAGE.md file.
• Replace resources/icon.png with your game's high-resolution icon.
• If you are targeting Android, you need to create a keystore for signing your game; full details are in the USAGE.md file.
• If you want to publish your game to itch.io, you need to add BUTLER_API_KEY to your GitHub repository; full details are in the USAGE.md file.

Running

• Press Ctrl + F5 to Run the game.
• Press F5 to Debug the game.
  • In debug mode you can use breakpoints and inspect variables.
  • This does have some performance impact though.
  • You can switch to Release mode in the Run and Debug tab (Ctrl + Shift + D)

Building

Builds a date stamped .love file and puts it in the builds folder. This doubles up as a simple backup system.

• Press Ctrl + Shift + B to Build the game.

Detailed Documentation

• USAGE.md

For more detailed technical information about development workflows, build configurations, and deployment processes, please see USAGE.md. This companion document covers:

• Complete project structure and file organization
• Project configuration and settings
• Local development and GitHub Actions workflow details
• Platform-specific build configurations
• Release management and publishing workflows
• Web deployment configurations
• Android signing setup
• Local testing procedures

References

Inspired by and adapted from LOVE VSCode Game Template, LÖVE Actions and love.js player from 2dengine.