creating a menu for a simple game

[cj1098]

Hello everyone! I just got started programming games and decided to try out love2d since I'm learning lua. I was wondering if anyone knows any good tutorials for creating just a simple 2-3 button menu when you start up the game.

[Inny]

There's a lot of stuff on the Wiki's Libraries page, https://love2d.org/wiki/Category:Libraries, and I recommend looking through those first before writing your own gui and gamestate management code.

[cj1098]

I'm aware of the gamestate libraries that are out there. I've been looking at Gwee in particular but I just can't figure out how to start.. I have a main file where the game resides. All I want to do is make a start up menu. It seems like I have to jump through so many hoops to get that.

[Inny]

If it's a simple "PRESS ENTER TO START" type of thing, then I guess you would do this:

Code: Select all

gamestate = "title"

function love.update(dt)
  if gamestate == "title" then
    if love.keyboard.isDown("return", "enter") then
      gamestate = "play"
    end
  else
    -- do your game logic here
  end
end

function love.draw()
  if gamestate == "title" then
    love.graphics.print( lalawhatever )
  else
    -- draw your game here
  end
end

That's more or less identical to what mari0 does. That game however has more complexity to it, since you can go in and out of menus. It does seem to key off of a single variable to manage it's overall game mode, so that's something you can start with.

[Kasperelo]

Not sure what's wrong right now...

[Petunien]

I think you use the wrong key-pressed-detected function.

Try:

Code: Select all

function love.keypressed(key, code)
	if gamestate == "title" then
		if key == "s" then
			gamestate = "playing"
		end
	end
end

So you change the gamestate if a key was pressed. Also, you forgot the "key" argument in your function, so it doesn't know what's to do.