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love letter engine

posted 04 march 2026

love letter 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 i'm pretty sure most of that is the bundled font.

i originally made this thing in under 48 hours without knowing a lick of lua (i still don't really) — i talk a bit about the process on the march 2026 artlog. it's inspired by videotome and has more or less feature parity, only it's adv instead of nvl (i'm sure you could manipulate this into a nvl style game with just a little knowledge of how love2d handles graphics).

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
• language support extension if you use vscodium / vscode (download from itch or its own github repo, which might be more up to date)
• you can build for all platforms supported by löve. i mainly use makelove to build for desktop and web. more about that on the readme.

what more could you possibly require?

if you require a bit less, love note is a toy version of ll in pure vanilla javascript.

you'll need love2d to test the game and stuff. more info such as syntax is on the readme within (also viewable in the github repo, which also hosts a cookbook with some hacks). good luck have fun.

demo

if the embed isn't working, view the demo on itch.

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