lovr-docs/guides/Game_Distribution.md

Game Distribution

Let's pretend you made an awesome game with LÖVR and you want to show it to the world (or your mom). Here are instructions for packaging a game into a standalone .exe file that can be distributed.

Step one

The first step is to create a .lovr file from your project. On Windows, create a .zip file from the files in your project by selecting them, right clicking, and choosing "Send to" -> "Compressed (zip) folder".

Once you have a .zip file for your project, change the extension to .lovr. You can test the .lovr file by dropping it onto lovr.exe.

On unix systems, the zip utility can be used to create a .lovr archive for the project.

Step two

Once you have a .lovr file, it needs to be "appended" to lovr.exe. To start, place your .lovr file in the same folder as lovr.exe. Next, press Windows + R and type cmd.exe to open the command prompt. From there, type cd C:\Users\Cena\Desktop\lovr, or wherever the LÖVR folder is. Finally, use the following command to create the executable:

copy /b lovr.exe+MyGame.lovr MyGame.exe

On unix systems, the cat utility can be used to concatenate the lovr file with lovr.exe.

Step Three

Awesome, now you have an exe for your game! Be sure to distribute it with all the .dll files that were in the LÖVR folder.