love letter engine
well so this here is a tiny engine for kinetic visual novels. the focus is in easy and fast writing without the temptation to scope creep and complicate things with features, as well as keeping file sizes small and cute. the demo game appimage, for example, is just under 5mb, and my first proper vn made with it, like an animal, is 5.5mb.
inspired by freya campbell's videotome, written in love2d in under 48 hours by someone who's never touched lua before.
features:
- up to two images displayed on screen (one "background" and one "sprite"). the sprite can be positioned wherever, with very basic animation when moved / repositioned
- audio (looping) and sound effects (non looping)
- very basic text rollback and auto (with three speeds!)
- script written in a plain old .txt
what else could you possibly require?
you'll need love2d to test the game and stuff. more info such as syntax and stuff is on the readme within (also viewable in the github repo). good luck have fun.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- v1.2.5 (minor bug fixes)22 days ago
- v1.2.4 (color customization)25 days ago
- v1.2.2 (comments)92 days ago
- v1.2.1 (auto)95 days ago
- v1.1 (sprite movement)99 days ago
- v1.0.1 (bugfix)Mar 05, 2026
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
this is very cool! i very quickly used this to make a manifesto for the manifesto jam. (most of my time making it was spent trying to get makelove to work.)
How did you get love.js to be so unobtrusive? when I made it (as a non-coder, btw) it comes in a pop-up window with an ugly border.
yayy awesome to see someone else use it! makelove is definitely a bit unwieldy to learn, i’ll say.
there are two files you can edit to change the look of lovejs: love.css (inside the theme folder) and index.html. it helps to have a little knowledge of html / css so you can tell what you’re looking at, but love.css should be mostly intuitive, and it’s what lets you customize the colors. you can delete the line
background-image: url(bg.png);to remove the default background image. i also like addingopacity: 60%;to the footer, just so it stands out less.in index.html, i remove the line with
<h1>title</h1>, because i prefer the cleaner look to my pages. whenever it says, for example,loadingContext.fillStyle = "rgb(55, 59, 68)";, that’s a color and you can also change it for further customization. the first time it appears is the background color, and the second is the text.after changing the files, i recommend copying them to another location, because if you use makelove again for that project they’ll be overriden, which is really annoying -_-
as for the itch page itself, i set the embed options to “embed in page” instead of “click to launch on fullscreen”, and make sure the “fullscreen button” option is unchecked since lovejs’ works better and there’s no need for two different fullscreen buttons.
hope this helps! love2d has its quirks but it’s not super complicated to work around them, just kinda annoying.
why are simple engines so Charming!! <3<3
hehe yes i think they’re so cute :3