Selene 🌙

Selene is a project template to quickly set up LOVE2D to run moonscript instead of Lua, without precompiling your .moon files to .lua

MoonScript is extremely well suited to writing games with its object-oriented approach!

Table of Contents

• Selene 🌙
• Table of Contents
• Installing
  • Install LOVE2D
  • Create Your Game
• Using
  • First Run
  • Writing Your Game
• Building and Testing
  • Build/Test Dependencies
  • Testing
  • Release Builds
    • Debugging Release Builds
• Notes
• Useful Documentation
• Contributions and Bug Fixes
• Thanks

Installing

Selene works on Debian, Ubuntu, NixOS, and Windows. It should also work anywhere else that LOVE2D runs!

Install LOVE2D

Selene needs LOVE2D to be installed to run your game, and you can get the installer for your platform at the LOVE2D website.

Create Your Game

You have two options when using Selene to create your game:

First (and most recommended) is to use this repo as a template repo. To do that, click the button at the top right of the github page that says "Use this template". That will create a new repo in your account that is a copy of the Selene repo!

Second, is you can directly clone and modify this repo (or a fork of it), or just download the zip file of this repo.

Once you have decided, just clone this repo (replace the link with your own if you forked or used it as a template):

$ git clone https://github.com/novafacing/selene.git

Then, you will need to tell git to download the submodules for this repo that are needed to run MoonScript without precompiling:

$ cd selene                               # Go into the git repository on your local machine
$ git submodule update --init --recursive # Update the git submodules for this repo

That's it! The conf.lua and main.lua take care of everything else to allow you to run the game!

Using

First Run

Now that you have the repository set up, just run love . to start your game! There is a demo project already configured for you, and you should see something like this:

and you should be able to move around with the arrow keys.

Writing Your Game

Now that you're all set up, write your game! Your source code should go in the src directory, and you can add as many files as you want. The main file gives an example of how to require another file (in this case Game.moon) to make your game's code modular. There is also a Player class and a Vector2 class to demonstrate how you might make your game even more modular.

Building and Testing

Build/Test Dependencies

You don't need any dependencies other than love to run your game, but you will to build and test it.

You will need a couple dependencies:

• lua >= 5.2: You can probably install from your package manager ie apt install lua5.2
• luarocks: You can probably also install this from your package manager, or you can get it here
• act: For local release builds, you will need to install act

Once you have luarocks installed, you can install the dependencies with:

$ luarocks make --dev

Don't forget the --dev, it's important!

Testing

There is a build/test script build.moon provided that works automatically with the template repo. You can invoke it to run tests like:

$ moon build.moon --test

It will run busted tests on all files matching a pattern, which defaults to Test.+%.moon but you can provide your own once you start writing your own tests like so:

$ moon build.moon src --test --pattern '.+Test%.moon'

Release Builds

Release builds of projects will contain the bare minimum files to run, so for release all .moon files will be compiled to .lua, all extra libraries are removed, and a .love or .exe is produced. You can produce a release build by running:

$ act --artifact-server-path=release

This will spin up a pipeline, build your release, and output the files to release.

Debugging Release Builds

The release build uses build.moon to compile all your .moon files to .lua. If you have an issue, you can invoke it locally:

$ moon build.moon src

This will display any build errors encountered.

You can clean up the lua files from the source tree with:

$ moon build.moon src --clean

But be aware this will delete all .lua files in src!

Notes

You'll notice that the embedded submodule is not moonscript master. Instead it is my own fork. All I have done is replace the C dependency lpeg with a drop-in replacement written in Lua, lulpeg. I'll update my MoonScript and LuLPeg repos from upstream periodically, and feel free to file an issue if they breaking due to being outdated.

Useful Documentation

• Love2D Documentation
• Moonscript Documentation

Contributions and Bug Fixes

Bug fixes and contributions are welcome! If you find any issues, just open an Issue and I'll take a look at it. I'm not going to formalize the process too much, because this is a tiny repo and I don't expect I'll add too much code to it. Any improvements are likewise appreciated!

Thanks

Thanks for using Selene! I hope it helps you create great games, and if you do, please open a PR to add a gif or screenshot of your game and a link to it to this README so you can show it off!