A LÖVE animation primer

Tutorial – LÖVE animation

Article from Issue 234/2020
Author(s):

LÖVE is an extension of the Lua language, designed to make developing games easy. In this tutorial, we'll explore this framework by creating some animated sprites.

The topic of game design can (and does) fill entire books, so we aren't going to tackle all of that today. Instead, we'll focus on a specific project, creating animated sprites in LÖVE [1], a Lua-based [2] framework that provides you with hundreds of tools and a coherent template for creating 2D games. By creating a simple animation cycle and having LÖVE show it in a window, we will explore the fundamentals of LÖVE and help you start thinking of the games you can create with the platform.

Running LÖVE

You can download LÖVE from the project's main page or use your software manager, as it is included with most mainstream distros. The current version is LÖVE 11.3.

When you run the LÖVE interpreter for the first time from the command line with love, you will initially see a screen that says "no game."

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