Vore

Vore is a Love game template leveraging Node ecosystem libraries like gulp to power an end-to-end build pipeline for both game code and assets.

Features

• Automatic build of Aseprite sources from data directory into .png/.json pairs for game use
• Automatic build of Tiled map sources from data directory into .lua tables
• All other data files merged into build output as-is
• Automatic build of Moonscript sources from src directory. moon and lua files can coexist in same package path.
• Merging of Moonscript and Lua sources to single path in build output
• Distribution packaging for Windows and macOS, and standalone .love
• Publishing via Butler to itch.io; linux published as .love archive
• Supports Windows, macOS, and Linux build environments.
• "Watch" mode instantly rebuilds any asset or source file as it's changed

Getting started

Download the contents of this repository and extract it into a new folder.

Make sure you have the following installed:

• Node 8.9 or later, including npm
• Love

These are optional, so long as you don't have files corrosponding to their formats in the data dir or use the publish command:

• Tiled
• Aseprite
• Moonscript; via LuaRocks is best
• Butler

Choose a name for your project, and edit the following files to use that name:

• package.json -- Change "name" key and "vore.butler.name" key if you want butler publishing support
• dist/mac/.itch.toml -- Change "path" key
• dist/mac/Info.plist -- Edit the CFBundleIdentifier to your own domain path, or at least something unique
• dist/win/.itch.toml -- Change "path" key to match the exact name from package.json

Now run the following to install the npm dependencies

npm install -g gulp-cli
npm install

Next, use gulp to generate a default config.json. Do this on every development computer, and do not check config.json in to version control.

gulp gen-default-config

You will need to edit the newly generated config.json and point it to the appropriate paths for each binary. Leave blank if it's optional and you don't want to use it. These are the full command paths, do not rely on shell PATH!

Create these directories for your project

mkdir data
mkdir src

Your moon and lua sources will go in src, and everything else goes in data. In game, the compiled output of data will be present at data as well, so e.g. you can require the Tiled maps at data.maps.yourmap_tmx.

Building and running your game

You can use the following command to build your game code and assets:

gulp build

Then, enter watch mode:

gulp watch

And, using the love exe path in your config.json, you can run love with:

gulp run

You can run watch and run at the same time if your game supports hot reloading.

Q/A

• Why vore? it vores your assets don't ask
• Can I add my own asset types? If the tool has a batch output mode or you have some processing that can be done in JS, sure.

License

This is released to the public domain under the CC0 license.