An Introduction to Game States in Love2D

Thu, 27 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

After going through countless blog and video tutorials on getting started with Love2D, I found it sad that most people would not take the approach of implementing game states right from the start, or would try to mimick this functionality in a “dirty” way.

After lots of time of reading many forum posts and library documentations. I found a way to implement game states in my games that I am very satisfied with.

In this post I will go over how to implement game states and some of the most common game states seen in games, in such a way that your code is remains organized and neat.

Game States With Stateful.lua

We will be using a simple but great Lua library called Stateful, made by kikito. This library will allow us to easily implement and work with game states inside our game.

This library also depends on the Middleclass library (also by kikito). Middleclass will allow us to construct and develop our game in a OOP (Object Oriented Programing) fashion. If you are familiar with OOP then you will love this approach.

Getting Started With Love2D Basics

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I recently started playing around with Love2D for game development. Although I am completely new to Lua, so far it's been pretty fun and I really like it.

I created this post to write down the most important basic concepts that I have encountered so far, so that I can use as quick reference later.

Setting Up a Basic IDE

So far I've been using Love2D in Windows. Initially I started using Sublime Text 2 as my editor, but then figured out how to make my Love2D development experience much better using Atom combined with Github for Windows.

In Atom there is a great package called love-ide which has many great tools and features for developming with Love.

Some of these features include Lua linting, autocomplete, and being able to run the Love application right from Atom.

Additionally, we will want to use Window's console for debugging. To do so, enable these options:

Working With Keyboard Keys

We can interact with user input through the keyboard by determining if a certain key has been pressed. This is done like this:

if love.keyboard.isDown("right") then
  -- ...
end

The love.keyboard.isDown function receives a KeyConstant string argument to indicate which key we want to test for. The complete list can be found here. Here are some examples:

Key string	Description
`space`	Space key
`backspace`	Backspace key
`down`	Down arrow key

lua on Andrés Álvarez

An Introduction to Game States in Love2D

Game States With Stateful.lua

Getting Started With Love2D Basics

Setting Up a Basic IDE

Working With Keyboard Keys