LÖVE (Love2D) on Android

Almost two years ago I blogged about my Global Game Jam entry called Hexoboros. This year’s approaching GGJ reminded me that I wanted to port this game to Android. Back then it turned out to be quite hard and results were not very satisfying.

I knew that SDL 2.0 was released in August 2013 bringing Android support out of the box. What I didn’t know was that LÖVE 0.9.0 was released in December as well, building on top of SDL2. I was pretty excited, because I felt that LÖVE on Android will became a real thing soon.

And I was right. Martin Felis is working on love-android-sdl2 repo, which combines all these efforts into one easy to build Android package.

After fixing some minor issues in Martin’s and mine code I ended up with this result:

Great! Now I’m convinced that I’ll be using LÖVE again during Global Game Jam this year.

Some notes:

• love-android-sdl2 loads LÖVE resources from /sdcard/lovegame/ directory (this is useful for debugging)
• if you zip your LÖVE resources to a file named game.love and add this file to assets directory of Android project, you end up with APK that bundles LÖVE with your game (this is great for deploying final game)
• never force fixed resolution in your LÖVE code; rather update your code so it works with any given resolution and aspect ratio (i.e. don’t hardcode sizes and positions of rendered objects)
• you can test you got that right by putting t.window.resizable = true in your conf.lua and using something like this in your main.lua code:

function love.resize(w, h)
  width, height = w, h
  scale = height / 1024
end

function love.load()
  love.resize(love.window.getWidth(), love.window.getHeight())
  ...