Packaging

Before shipping the game to the public, it is necessary to add several game levels, get rid of the bugs, test and polish everything. I won't describe details of this process but it is actually what constitutes significant part of game development work.

When the game is ready for release, it is necessary to package it into distributable form. LÖVE provides two possibilities for this. The first method is to create a .love file (which is in fact just a zip archive), that can be executed by the LÖVE interpreter. The second method is to bind the LÖVE interpreter together with the game and distribute a self-contained executable file.

Advantage of the first approach is simplicity for the developer: creation of a .love file is easy to accomplish. Advantage of the second is simplicity for the user: there is no need to install any additional software to run the game.

For this project, I'll use the first method, but for commercial games the second approach is preferable. I plan to address it in one of the appendices. Love-release is a helpful tool to automate creation of .love packages and stand-alone executables for various platforms. Besides, with external tools such as love.js it is relatively easy to create a web-version of your game. Give them a try.

On GNU/Linux, a convenient way to create a *.love archive is by make utility.

There are lots of tutorials describing Makefile syntax. In short, a typical entry - called "rule" - has the following form:

target: dependency1 dependency2 .....
	command1
	command2
	.....

The following recursive strategy is used: to execute the rule with the name target, first execute the rules for each of it's dependencies; after that, execute each command in the list of the commands. So, typing make target will result in Make looking for and executing rules for dependency1, dependency2 etc, and after that executing a series of commands command1, command2 etc.

For the current project the following Makefile is used:

NAME=love2d_arkanoid_tutorial

all: love

love:
	zip -r ${NAME}.love *.lua \
			fonts img levels sounds \
			credits.txt Makefile \
			../LICENSE ../README.md

clean:
	rm -f *.love

Commands make, make all and make love will create a LÖVE package (zip archive with love extension) with all the necessary files to run the game; make clean will delete this archive.