After installing my usual go-to tools to make games, Blender, Godot & Krita; I stumbled upon game libraries. I had known of libgdx but just never looked into something that might agree more with my sensibilities.

Eventually, I landed on a few options that I’m seriously considering sinking my teeth into. Those being C/Raylib and Lua/LÖVE.

I’m still an inexperienced programmer so I feel like this is a good way to practice on those skills. And while I can’t pin point it just yet, those two have a coziness to them that I really like.

As people say, I need to familiarize myself with the vegetables of the pantry before trying to cook complicated dishes. So to kind of do this (along with tinkering around with it every night) is to actually read the API, not like skimming through everything I think I might need but thoroughly read through it. Which brings me to…

I kind of want to try making a manual?

Stick with me here but as a kid, I loved manuals. I Remember somehow finding a manual for sim city 2000 and just falling in love with the tome. Fast forward to present day and the office I work at recently bought a fancy new printer.

To test out how fast it could print, I finagled the printer dialogue to print me the whole C Programming Language book on legal paper, front and back, bounded on the short left side, with 3 pages on each page… gotta say its pretty comfy to read through like this. Feels very medieval.

So, with my love of old manuals and my skills of knowing how to work inDesign, I want to make a Love2D 11.4 API manual that is printer friendly and easy to navigate.

It’s kind of an interesting type of problem to design for when my dayjob has me designing newspaper layouts. I’m not writing anything myself and I’m basically just copy/pasta’ing everything and hand typing out sections that I’m interested in.

But it has me questioning the usual design choices I make for ads and such. For example in a ‘printer friendly’ format, should I sacrifice readability for space-usage?

For now, I’m leaning on keeping the document more readable (for my own sake at the moment) but also just for others who might print this out. I’m imagining that there’s already cheat sheets for Love2D.

But yup

That’s what I’m working on in my work downtime. I’ll put this on my itch.io for download when complete. I think it’d be perfect for someone who might have limited internet or maybe has access to a printer and wants an offline API. Could also be a good portfolio piece lol.

Until next time.