Panel Attack Development

Development Setup

Installing love

The current stable version uses love 11.5. Simply install from http://love2d.org/.
The beta version is the main development version and uses love 12.0.
Love 12 is still in development. You can find love 12.0 CI builds in the love repository. Simply pick the newest workflow run, scroll down and select the artifact suitable for your machine.

Setting up the Panel Attack repository

Clone a copy of the repository

git clone https://github.com/panel-attack/panel-game.git

We recommend using GitHub Desktop as it manages login for you and makes working with git easier.

We recommend developing and running the game using Visual Studio Code.
You can setup VSCode with a debugger and more following this tutorial.

Alternatively, you can edit with your own favorite text editor and run love from the command line

cd Panel-Attack
love ./

or via drag and drop with the repository folder (not recommended).

Repository

The beta branch is where we do all main development.

All pull requests require a review by a maintainer (or 1 review and written by a maintainer).
Feature and bug commits are done by maintainers using squash merges.
Merges are done by the maintainers as merge commits.

Please check the contribution guidelines for further information.

Release schedule

Main releases

Panel Attack currently has 3 release streams that see updates at varying rates.

canary release

Cutting edge build, automatically generated with every push to beta.
Available via https://github.com/panel-attack/panel-game/releases.

beta release

beta release, a bit more tested than canary. Features are released on beta if there is some confidence that they're mostly working correctly.

Release notes are posted in #panel-attack-updates on the discord when updates go out.

stable release

stable release, tested features that just work.
Stable releases take tournament dates into consideration so that any bugs that may still get caught don't interfere with them.

Release notes are posted in #panel-attack-updates on the discord when updates go out.

Useful Lua Programming Tips

Big comment

--[[
--]]

Comment parameter names inline

  return self:pop_all_ready_garbage(frame, true--[[just_peeking]])

Lua Manual
https://www.lua.org/pil/contents.html

Love2d Tutorial
https://sheepolution.com/learn/book/contents

For Maintainers

Releasing

To make a release we create a love file and put it on the server. Change the name of the love file to the output of a command like this:
Stable:
echo "panel-$(date -u "+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S").love"
Beta:
echo "panel-beta-$(date -u "+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S").love"

Secure copy the file to the server in correct folder on the server.
Stable:
scp -i privatekey.pem panel-2022-06-25_03-50-14.love username@panelattack.com:updates
Beta:
scp -i privatekey.pem panel-2022-06-25_03-50-14.love username@panelattack.com:beta-updates

Test that the game updates properly.

Post release notes in #panel-attack-updates on the discord.