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Writing a Game with Fennel and LÖVE

A topic by Alex ☕🇨🇦 created May 15, 2023 Views: 297 Replies: 1
Viewing posts 1 to 2
Submitted (1 edit) (+3)

The Minimal fennel Löve2d repo has been updated!

https://gitlab.com/alexjgriffith/min-love2d-fennel

  • The repo is now using Fennel 1.3.0
  • The web builder supports Love 1.4
  • There is now a script for changing your projects fennel version

If you want to use Fennel 1.3.0-dev (or any other version of fennel) you can use the fennel-update.sh in scripts.

This repo is slowly expanding from a truly minimal setup to one that comes with a few batteries included. If you want a barebones setup to get you started check out: absolutely-minimal-love2d-fennel by @benthor.

If you want to just start coding up some fennel and love with no makefile or manual installation on linux check out love-fennel

Where to Start?

I highly recommend checking out the blog posts by Phil Hagelberg about his use of fennel for his 2018 submission Exo Encounter 667. The source for which can be found here

There is also a built in REPL on the languages home page that you can test out the language! https://fennel-lang.org/

Games Made Using Love2D and Fennel

This is not an exhaustive list! I can include your game if you comment below.

Other resources:

Recommended Libraries

You don’t need any libraries to make a game! The ones mentioned here help solve specific problems.

Lume

https://github.com/rxi/lume

  • Provides functional style functions, e.g. reduce, map, etc.
  • Provides some nice to haves that are not available in the lua standard library like lerp and split (for spiting strings).

ANIM8

https://github.com/kikito/anim8

If you need sprite animation, check out ANIM8!

Bump

https://github.com/kikito/bump.lua

Bump is an axis aligned bounding box collider. It has a bunch of useful built in presets for triggering actions following collisions. If you’re writing a platformer (without ramps) I highly recommend bump!

Tiled

https://github.com/karai17/Simple-Tiled-Implementation

If you use want to use Tiled (https://mapeditor.org) check out the Simple Tiled Implementation! It works well with bump.

There are many more libraries! Any library that works with Love and lua will work with Love and fennel.

Submitted (1 edit)

Thank you for the post! My submission to Lisp Game Jam 2022 - ctga (https://github.com/dawranliou/ctga), was built with Fennel and LÖVE, too, using the min-love2d-fennel template :)

I feel like I've only scratched the surface of game development/design, so I'll check out the links you shared. Thank you for sharing and maintaining the repo 🙏