My LÖVE Development Environment

Recently I have gotten back into doing some coding again, in particular, using the LÖVE framework and the language lua to make simple 2D based games. While I’ve played with other game engines such as Unity and Godot (Godot is my favorite right now) I just seem to prefer writing everything in scripts and code rather than messing around with an graphical editor.

Code Editor

Normally I would use vim, but I just couldn’t get the workflow working how I liked it. So I ended up using Visual Code on my mac. I use the vi extensions so it kinda still feels like home. :) I’m also running the following lua/love specific extensions:

Love2D Support (pixelbyte-studios.pixelbyte-love2d)

This extension has the intellisense and more importantly allows me to cmd-L and run the current project directly from Visual Code. A massive timesaver.

Local Lua Debugger (tomblind.local-lua-debugger-vscode)

This allows debugging. I initially had some issues getting this debugger working correctly, but after some trial and error I got it working with the following options set in my launch.json config file:

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "Debug LÖVE game",
            "type": "lua-local",
            "request": "launch",
            "program": {
                "command": "love"
            },
            "args": [
                "."
            ],
            "scriptRoots": [
                "."
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Lets see over the coming weeks how my workflow holds up and evolves over time.