That's a really interesting question. I created some small games with Löve and really loved it. However I always found the whole packaging/distribution/deployment a bit of a problematic topic.

If you don't just want to distribute a .love file (e.g. you do not want your user to get the Löve runtime themselves) this was basically unsupported and you had to come up with your own solutions..

I still think if the Löve community could improve this part it would help the most.

There are some packaging tools that help with distribution (like https://github.com/pfirsich/makelove/ - I made this). What would you like improved?

That looks very interesting. Thanks for creating and sharing. This wasn't available back when I used Löve. Maybe I should give it another shot. I will certainly try your tool!

Nice work. How did you go about app signing on macOS? It's a big issue making something that doesn't launch like the antichrist built it.

If it's supported, or not, documentation is king!

There is nothing built-in for it per se. I think you just have to sign the application from a postbuild hook, I think. I remember discussing this with the person that contributed the Mac build, but I don't remember the result of the discussion exactly. I think that was it though.

Someone should solve this with a Javascript app in an electron wrapper

oh god, no. Please stop trying to push javascript (and your damned node packages) into everything. There are community tools to package LÖVE games for win/mac/linux.

It's possible I'm taking it the wrong way, but I think their comment was meant facetiously.

(grabs holy water, garlic, and a crucifix)

Why don't you want to distribute the love runtime + .love file to your users?

Less polished, and more steps. People want to download a game. Not a patchwork of files and runtimes. It doesn't feel "productioney".

But you can distribute e.g. a zip file with both the run time and data in it, can't you? How is that any different from how any other game is distributed?

Do people even have to know? I’d anyway these days distribute via itch or steam

You can use steam to install runtimes with install scripts [0]

[0] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/installscripts

Fair point.

How to do that exactly to make the user click and run the application without a second thought?

I'll throw in my 3c, it was 2016 and I've been trying to create a fully static x86-64 Linux binary, to hopefully avoid all the problems with DLL hell (as Löve links to an awful lot of stuff, and judging by the .so numbers it was unlikely to work in a year or two). TL;DR I've spent more time fighting the linker than writing the actual games ;)

I didn't want to rely on whatever-version-of-löve-this-distro-has-packaged because Löve at the time would break API compat quite frivolously. You can probably use an AppImage these days but I think this goes against the intent and spirit of Löve. It should be trivial to build entirely self-contained binaries; and in case of Windows/Mac, it was indeed the case (modulo code signing).