lover

lover is a simple LÖVE game development CLI, for those of us who prefer CLIs over drag-and-drop ;)

Furthermore, lover can be used to manage local development LÖVE binary installations, and when it comes time to distribute your LÖVE project, lover can be easily used for packaging your project with the right version of LÖVE for the platform you are targeting.

Installation

Using pip

pip install git+https://github.com/jerluc/lover.git

From source

git clone https://github.com/jerluc/lover.git
cd lover
python setup.py install

Quick start

Once you've followed the instructions on installing lover, you can create a brand-new "Hello, world!" LÖVE project by running:

lover new hello-lover

This will create a new LÖVE-based project in a directory called hello-lover configured by the prompted options. Note: this step may take a few minutes the very first time as it downloads the latest binary version of LÖVE for your platform. Future invocations of lover new will reuse this same cached binary, however.

Next, to run your new project, simply do:

# If you weren't already there
cd hello-lover
lover run

This should start the application in a new window and display a black screen with "Hello, world!" written in white.

Lastly, if you just want to show off your cool project to your friends and family, or if you need to package up your AAA game for release on Steam, simply do (again within the hello-lover directory):

lover dist

This will create your distributable project files in a new directory under dist/{LOVE_VERSION}/{TARGET_PLATFORM} (e.g. dist/0.10.1/darwin-64bit/hello-lover.app on macOS).

And that's it! You're now ready to start developing your own games with the LÖVE 2D framework!

Full usage guide

Usage: lover [OPTIONS] COMMAND1 [ARGS]... [COMMAND2 [ARGS]...]...

Options:
  --version   Show the version and exit.
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  dist  Packages your project for distribution
  new   Creates a new LÖVE project
  run   Runs your project

Commands

`new`

Initializes a brand new LÖVE-based project by downloading and extracting the latest LÖVE distribution for your platform (or using the specific platforms and versions specified in your .lover.yaml), and creating a simple "Hello, world" main.lua.

`run`

Runs your current project using your platform-specific LÖVE distribution and the version configured in your .lover.yaml.

`dist`

Packages your current project into a distributable binary package for the platforms specified in your .lover.yaml.

Note that this only supports macOS packaging at the moment.

Configuration file

For now, the configuration file (by default this is located in the root of your project directory as .lover.yaml) contains the following properties:

name Your project name
description A human-readable description of your project
author Your name
loveVersion The version of LÖVE required for your project (defaults to latest)
targets A list of each platform you want to target (must be one of: win-32bit, win-64bit, darwin-64bit)

Supported platforms

At the moment, lover only supports macOS and Windows for automating project setup, but can still be used for actually running your project during development.

Coming soon

Support for more platforms (see #5 for details)
Automated distribution/packaging for multiple platforms
Auto-reloading project on file change