Lovely.js

Patched LÖVE web runtime bundles for Lovely.

Lovely.js no longer treats the old love.js npm CLI as the product. It is the runtime-builder side of the Lovely toolchain: it packages browser runtime artifacts that the Lovely CLI can verify, cache, and copy into web builds.

Prior Art

This project builds on the earlier love.js ecosystem. The immediate upstream was Davidobot/love.js, which modernized the original TannerRogalsky/love.js work for newer LÖVE and Emscripten versions.

Those projects made LÖVE-on-the-web practical. Lovely.js continues from that foundation because the earlier repositories appear inactive and the Lovely ecosystem needs a maintained runtime bundle pipeline.

The modern Lovely.js code is MIT licensed by DVDA Games. Inherited love.js notices are preserved in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Build

npm test
npm run build

The build currently repackages the inherited prebuilt LÖVE 11.5/Emscripten 2.0.0 artifacts from src/compat and src/release into runtime bundles:

dist/web-compat
dist/web-threaded

Each output includes a lovely-runtime.json manifest with file checksums. The bundle also includes a default index.html template and Lovely-owned browser support files: lovely-game-loader.js for direct game.love loading and lovely-web-shims.js for canvas, fullscreen, resize, and text-input helpers.

Runtime Variants

web-compat is the default Itch.io target. It avoids pthreads and does not require cross-origin isolation headers.

web-threaded uses the threaded runtime and requires hosts to serve the page with:

Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin
Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: require-corp

Repo Responsibilities

Lovely.js owns:

• patched LÖVE web runtime artifacts,
• runtime manifests and checksums,
• runtime build/release automation,
• browser/runtime patches needed by Lovely games.
• web loader and browser compatibility shims.

Lovely owns:

• game archive creation,
• web HTML generation,
• game data packaging,
• Itch/desktop publishing workflows,
• runtime resolution and cache verification.

See docs/runtime-contract.md for the bundle contract between the two repositories.