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Balatro ships with the entire unobfuscated Lua source by the way.

I once checked if the odds stated on a card were implemented wrong. Turns out no, the code checks out, I'm just that unlucky.

In case you're curious, here's a Nix derivation to make Balatro for any other system playable on Linux:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/by-name/ba...

I wrote half a blog post when I did the derivation. One day, I should finish it and post it here.

> One of the biggest recent indie hits, Balatro, was made in Löve!

Moonring[1] is another one that that is written in Löve (apparently by the co-creator of XBox's Fable series). The base game is even available for free. I had lots of fun playing it.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2373630/Moonring/

A lot of indie devs actually are fine with decompiling/viewing source. Even the STS2 devs have no issue with this. I think it is great and helps the indie dev community. Seeing this has actually made me excited about game dev to the point where I'm beginning to dig in myself.

Haven't used it in almost 10 years but at least back then one sticky point was that unlike unity and the like, opening the exe didn't open an IDE. Just kind of a dummy window. Also building for Mac from Windows was a nightmare since my end user was not technically literate and it didn't just run on their end. But that's likely just a Mac issue

The (crucial) arrow keys don’t seem to work in Safari.

> Carimbo doesn't reinvent the wheel; it uses the best libraries, such as boost, Box2D, EnTT, stb, yyjson, sol2, PhysFS, SDL, and miniaudio.

To me this sounds similar to Love2D. How is Carimbo different, from the perspective of a dev working with it?

What does your engine have to do with Love 2D other than also using Lua?

It’s been a recurring issue I’ve seen in open source where there is active development but no releases. I don’t get why you’d put all the work in to fixing bugs and building features but not hit the button to build a release.

You might like MonoGame. Same level of abstraction, but in C#.

https://monogame.net

"long in the tooth"

How? has Lua changed any?

Or all the references are to old versions?

What were your (main) problems with Kodi? AFAIK it is written in C++ with Python plugins. Electron would be (on the face) a downgrade yes. But how is a Lua app much smoother?

(My personal pet peeve is that Kodi still doesn't know how to minimize CPU consumption when one is doing nothing on the UI. It should just stop rendering. This means I have to turn Kodi off on my HTPC+server setup to stop it from pushing my CPU in a higher power consumption mode.)

The Lua source code is also a masterclass in C, I recommend it to anyone learning that language. It's big enough to be an involved implementation, but small and focused and well-organized enough to (at least roughly) understand what's going on at the various layers. It's a very solidly-written mass of portable C, with only minor exceptions.

I know it’s bikeshedding and leads to pointless discussions, but in my opinion Lua would be the perfect scripting language if it had 0-based indexing.

“It makes more sense this way” is not a good enough reason to break convention.

Lua will forever hold a special place in my heart. It was the first programming language that I actually managed to learn, instead of just attempting to learn it.

It was chosen around 2008 or so to be the scripting language in Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas.

We build entire worlds in Lua, there were many gamemodes, but my favorite was Roleplay.

Good old carefree times.

exactly, the simplicity is its beauty!

A single data structure (tables), no built in OOP (you build it with metatables).

Coroutines instead of threads.

I was curious and explored it in detail here - https://vectree.io/c/lua-language-design-metatables-coroutin...

It has a very lego-like feeling, with simple, orthogonal design that lets you build the language and constructs you need. Very elegant.

Because Lua is simple and elegant — like the moon, isn’t it?

Lua is a scripting language done right.

It doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. Anyone can learn it a couple of sessions. It has all the stuff you need to write a program.

Imagine if we had Lua instead of JS in the browser.

In fact the latter was once closer to Lua, but didn’t have the same philosophy of wanting to stay minimal.

I looove stabyourself. ortho robot was amazing. you know what, let me install again.. here goes my night.

Agreed, mari0 is awesome.

Pity it's not playable in even mildly current versions of love because being backwards compatible takes some slight effort on behalf of framework maintainers.

How have they not been sued by Nintendo yet?

Tiny CC doesn't have its own runtime, it uses whatever you specify (falling back to system standard), same as GCC or Clang. For low runtime footprint you are probably better off with one of those two compilers as they generate smaller, more optimised code.

It seems to have updated to SDL3 - https://github.com/love2d/love/blob/main/CMakeLists.txt#L178

SDL3 should get more love in general.

The SDL3 GPU API[1] provided a cross-platform GPU API even before WebGPU.

In Rust it's a good alternative for winit/wgpu. For that reason I added it to areweguiyet.com[2] last week, where apparently it wasn't even listed before.

I am currently using it to develop a space game[3] inspired by the original BBC Elite. Using emscripten to get on the web and QUIC/Webtransport for networking.

[1]: https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/CategoryGPU

[2]: https://areweguiyet.com/#ecosystem

[3]: https://git.levitati.ng/LevitatingBusinessMan/elite/src/bran...

There is a lot more that goes into Love2D than just SDL. It uses many other libraries for sound, image loading, etc as well as using luajit so that the lua runs very fast and has a super easy C FFI.

Now why would you hate lua of all things?

SDL3

> If you want a modable game you really need to have it in a managed language

... Why is that? Personally, both as a game developer and modder, dynamic languages like Lua and alike tend to be a lot easier to make moddable and also force in mods regardless of how the authors felt about modding in the first place. Isn't it quite the opposite?

TIC-80 is a nice free as in freedom alternative to PICO-8, and it allows more inputs, which makes for better Tetris games (gotta have that hold piece).

antirez' LOAD81 never gets enough love in these discussions even though it is simply awesome:

https://github.com/antirez/load81

Anyone looking at Lua/SDL/game engines would learn a lot from antirez' fun little afternoon project ..

As long as we're doing mentions, here's a reminder. If you bought the racial equality bundle in itch.io you already own pico8. You can download the latest version right now on itch.io.

(It is neither open source nor free)

they include a LÖVE demo in their documentation: https://dev.fennel-lang.org/wiki/CookbookPong

Pretty sure there is still app packaging documented somewhere. There is also, at least for Android, an official Löve2D Launcher app that can open any love-file saved to the phone and execute it. I use that all the time.

The Launcher is available also for old Android versions, which means that old obsolete Android devices (I have some tablets and phones) can be used for whatever it can be fun to still write some GUI for on some spare touchscreen device.

I'm curious as to how you came to that conclusion. Did you run any tests, or is it just a general observation? What's your computer hardware like? This isn't an accusation of anything, I promise I'm genuinely curious.

I don’t usually push LÖVE to its limits because I tend to make simple games as a hobby but I do keep an eye on its framerate and often it‘s in the 100s of frames per second. So it may not be impressive (in sense of winning benchmarks) but it’s rarely perceivably slow.

It isn't web based? It's a set of Lua scripts that run locally

Godot will be familiar to you if you then.

Löve on the other hand is 100% just code. You'll not have the gui things and the pletora of different components that go with them. Still gives you freedom. Just too much freedom and not as much helpful preset tools.

Yeah, Love2d is a great option for gamedev. It doesn't have the same built-in tools as Godot so you'll need something else for putting together maps (use Tiled [1]), and you'll need to write your own main/render loops (these are just two for loops, nothing fancy).

[1] https://www.mapeditor.org/

It’s very different, and it depends what you are targeting. I love love2d.

I think love2d is better if what you love is coding, everything is code, love2d just executes Lua.

If what someone wants to do is make (for example) a 2d platformer, or definately for 3d, and the coding is something you need to do to make your game, goody is better, it includes so many batteries, have a built in gui level editor, etc.

One big advantage of love2d (although ironically not loved by many in its audience) is it is the AI friendly engine, as AIs love text and hate GUIs.

I haven't done it myself, using game engines as UI frameworks is not unheard of :)

I love their stuff, but curious if anyone besides them actually use uxn to make stuff

The fantasy computer by 100 rabbits? I love their philosophy, I'm glad Varvara exists, but I'm personally not up to program assembly for a 4-color screen, and I'm sure many others are the same.

The project was started by Norwegians. So I feel like you should apply juuuust the right amount of cheesiness and sort of push that Ø-vowel looong. Not sure if Ruud would agree, though.

I am fairly certain it's a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut

I instinctively pronounce it [løv].

The project predates Github, although the first official release came out about a month prior. So, yeah, not a lot of AI slop 20 years ago.