malazar / awesome-love2d

A curated list of amazingly awesome LÖVE libraries, resources and shiny things.

A categorized community-driven collection of high-quality, awesome LÖVE libraries, projects, and resources.

Table of contents

• 3D
• AI
• Animation
• Camera
• Development
• Drawing
• Entity
• Helper Libraries
• Input
• Lighting
• Math
• Networking
• Object Orientation
• Physics
• Platforms
• Serialization
• Shaders
• Testing
• Tutorials
• Tweening
• UI
• Utilities

3D

3D-centric Libraries

• anim9 - 3D skeletal animation library (design to be used with IQM and IQE)
• IQE - Inter-Quake Export loader (text)
• IQM - Inter-Quake Model loader (binary)
• LÖVE3D - 3D extensions to LÖVE

AI

Navigation, Decision-Making and AI Libraries

• Jumper - Grid-based pathfinding library

Animation

Animation & Frame-Managing Libraries

• anim8 - Animation library
• chiro - Convenience wrapper around Spine
• skeletor - 2D skeletal animation system
• Sodapop - Sprite and animation library
• Walt - Animation library

Camera

Viewport & Camera Libraries

• Brady - Camera library with parallax scrolling
• Editgrid - Gamera and HUMP compatible scaling grid
• gamera - Camera system
• hump.camera - Camera library with window locking and smooth camera movement interpolation

Development

Development assisting Libraries, that enrich your development experience

• FPSGraph - Small FPS graphing utility
• debugGraph - Small OO FPS graphing utillity based on FPSGraph
• love-ide - Tools for programming LÖVE games in Atom
• Lovebird - Browser-based debug console
• Lovecat - Edit your game parameters in a browser and see the changes in the running game in real time
• lurker - Auto-swaps changed Lua files in a running game
• LÖVE API - The complete API documentation of LÖVE in a Lua table
• LÖVE Atom - Snippets and autocompletion for Atom
• LÖVE Hints - Snippets, code hints and autocompletion for Brackets
• LÖVE IDEA - Snippets and code completion for IntelliJ IDEA
• Vim LOVE Docs - Syntax highlighting for Vim

Drawing

Drawing specific Libraries, that simplify the Drawing process

• draft - A module for drawing complex shapes
• Artal - A .PSD parsing library for LÖVE

Entity

Entity and Gameobject Managing Libraries

• knife.system - Minimalist functional ECS
• tiny-ecs - Entity Component System for Lua that's simple, flexible, and useful

Helper Libraries

Game specific Library bundles, that provide reuseable functions

• hump - Collection of tools for developing games with LÖVE (Gamestates, Timers/Tweens, Vectors, Classes, Signals, Cameras)
• knife - Collection of useful micro-modules for Lua (Class, State Machines, Bind, Chain, Coroutines, Event, Memoize, Entity, Tests, Timer)
• lume - Collection of functions for Lua, geared towards game development
• Simple Tiled Implementation - Tiled map loader and renderer
• Vivid - Color math, manipulation and conversion library.

Input

Input & Binding Libraries

• boipushy - A simple and easy to use input handler
• tactile - A straightforward and flexible input library

Lighting

Lighting & Shadow Libraries

• Light World - A lighting model

Math

Math specific Libraries

• Cirno's Perfect Math Library - Math/intersection library designed for games
• delaunay - Delaunay triangulation for convex polygons
• MLib - Math and shape-intersection detection library written in Lua. It's aim is to be robust and easy to use
• hump.vector - Powerful 2D vector class

Networking

Networking & Online-Play Libraries

• Grease - Networking library intended to make networking easy for lovers (TCP, UDP, Enet)
• NoobHub - OpenSource multiplayer and network messaging

Object Orientation

Object Orientation Libraries that support Class-Commons

• 30log - Minified framework for object-orientation in Lua. It features named (and unnamed) classes, single inheritance and a basic support for mixins
• classic - Tiny class module for Lua. Attempts to stay simple and provide decent performance by avoiding unnecessary over-abstraction
• hump.class - Small, fast class/prototype implementation with multiple inheritance (class-commons)
• knife.base - Extremely minimal base class providing single inheritance and constructors.
• middleclass - Simple OOP library for Lua; has inheritance, metamethods (operators), class variables and weak mixin support (class-commons)

Physics

Collision Detection & Physics Wrappers

• Bump - Collision detection library for Lua
• HC - Collision detection with arbitrary polygons; allows rotation of objects
• Lope2D - Wrap for love.physics; makes dealing with the physics API easier and faster

##Platforms Ports for Platforms other than Windows, Mac and Linux

• LoveDos - A Lua framework for 2D DOS games, implementing a subset of the LÖVE API
• LoveFTW - Work-in-progress port to Windows phone 8.1
• LovePotion - Unofficial work-in-progress implementation of the LÖVE API for 3DS Homebrew
• Love.js - LÖVE ported to the web using Emscripten

Serialization

Save Game & Storage Libraries

• binser - Customizable Lua Serializer
• cdata - Serialize between Lua data and C data using LuaJIT's FFI
• knife.serialize - Serialize data as a Lua script.
• Lady - Saving and loading savegames; based on Ser
• Ser - Fast, robust, richly-featured table serialization library for Lua
• Smallfolk - A fast, robust, secure, richly-featured table serialization library for Lua
• trickle - A bitstream library focused on high compression for use in networking

Shaders

GLSL related Libraries

• LoveShaderConverter - Convert Shadertoy Shader files to LÖVE GLSL Files with handy utilities for infinite purposes.
• Shadertoy viewer - Run code copied from shadertoy directly or output the converted code to a LÖVE shader
• shine - Repository of common post-processing effects like blur, vignette, color-grading, etc.

Testing

Libraries and Tools for Unit Testing

• busted - Simple unit-testing framework with customizable assertions
• knife.test - Fixture-free test framework
• Luassert - Extends assert() with additional, customizable tests
• lua-TestMore - Port of Perl's Test::More package
• Lunatest - xUnit-style randomized unit testing framework
• lust - Minimal test framework
• Specl - Behavior Driven Development (BDD) tool
• Telescope - Highly-customizable BDD-style testing library

Tutorials

• adonaac's - A blog by adonaac with articles about game development using LÖVE
• Using Tiled Maps in LÖVE - An article about using maps created with Tiled in your LÖVE game

Tweening

Smoothing & Timer Libraries

• Flux - A fast, lightweight tweening library for Lua
• hump.timer - Timer and tweening library with flexible tweening methods
• knife.timer - Create timers and tweens with ease.
• tween.lua - Tweening/Easing/Interpolating functions for Lua inspired on jQuery's animate method

UI

User Interface Libraries

• GOOi - Android-oriented GUI library
• LoveFrames - GUI library
• SafeWord - An overscan detection library for LÖVE
• Thranduil - A highly customable and easy to use UI
• Gspöt - a stateful GUI lib for LÖVE
• SUIT - small immediate mode GUI library

Utilities

Non-Game specific Library bundles, that provide reuseable functions

• cargo - Asset manager
• chance.lua - Library for generating random data
• i18n - Internationalization library designed to help localize your game
• log.lua - Library for configurable log output
• love-loader - Threaded resource loading
• love2d-assets-loader - Assets Loader
• Luvent - Simple event-driven programming
• splashy - Splash Screen Library
• Talkback - Observer pattern library with two-way communication.
• tick - Useful timing tweaks for LÖVE's run loop.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Other Awesome Lists

• awesome-lua - A list like this one, but more general and encompassing all of Lua's uses.
• awesome-love-shaders - A collection of shaders designed to work in LÖVE.

Other awesome lists can be found in the awesome-awesomeness list.