For those who want to try out Fennel for the LÖVE 2022 Jam, check out the Minimal fennel Löve2d repo.

https://gitlab.com/alexjgriffith/min-love2d-fennel

Improvements from last year:

1. Fixed build scripts for Mac, Windows, and Linux
2. Included build tools to target HTML5 (example)
3. Fennel Macro searchers added!
4. Error handling (boots you to a recoverable error screen)

It is set to work with love2d 11.3 by default.

Where to Start?

I highly recommend checking out the blog posts by Phil Hagelberg about his use of fennel for his 2018 submission Exo Encounter 667. The source for which can be found here

There is also a built in REPL on the languages home page that you can test out the language! https://fennel-lang.org/

Games Made Using Love2D and Fennel

This is not an exhaustive list! I can include your game if you comment below.

• Exo Encounter 667 - Winner of the 2018 Spring Lisp Game Jam - https://gitlab.com/technomancy/exo-encounter-667
• Always Kill Your Heroes - Winner of the 2018 Fall Lisp Game Jam https://gitlab.com/alexjgriffith/always-kill-your-heroes
• Slime the World - https://github.com/TsarFox/slime-the-world
• Goo Runner - https://gitlab.com/technomancy/goo-runner
• Fallen - https://gitlab.com/alexjgriffith/fallen
• Energize - Winner of the 2019 Fall Lisp Game Jam - https://github.com/noisesmith/energize
• Welcome Home Sunsun - https://gitlab.com/alexjgriffith/welcome-home-sunsun
• Backpackless - Submission to the 2019 GMTK Game Jam - https://github.com/lockie/backpackless

Other resources:

• Fennel Tutorial
• Fennel Reference
• Fennel Site - Embedded Repl
• Love2d Wiki

Recommended Libraries

You don’t need any libraries to make a game! The ones mentioned here help solve specific problems.

Lume

https://github.com/rxi/lume

• Provides functional style functions, e.g. reduce, map, etc.
• Provides some nice to haves that are not available in the lua standard library like lerp and split (for spiting strings).

ANIM8

https://github.com/kikito/anim8

If you need sprite animation, check out ANIM8!

Bump

https://github.com/kikito/bump.lua

Bump is an axis aligned bounding box collider. It has a bunch of useful built in presets for triggering actions following collisions. If you’re writing a platformer (without ramps) I highly recommend bump!

Tiled

https://github.com/karai17/Simple-Tiled-Implementation

If you use want to use Tiled (https://mapeditor.org) check out the Simple Tiled Implementation! It works well with bump.

Wow this is awesome info! I will have to take a look too, sounds interesting.

I wonder if I can make it work with Concord! I’m interested how the syntax would look like or what additions would be needed.

I’m glad that we have something else other than Moonscript and Haxe to work with LÖVE <3

For even easier setup on Linux check outlove-fennel

love-fennel.sh will let you get up and running with LOVE and Fennel without downloading either in advance. And, it starts up an interactive repl that lets you play around with your game in code while its running. love-fennel.sh lets you build .love files, however the distribute your game on Windows, Mac, Linux and HTML5 I’d recommend transitioning to min-love2d-fennel

Suggested name changes appreciated :p