steamy is a library/tool for LÖVE that facilitates remote development and testing.
You can use steamy to remotely receive and launch game files within LÖVE itself. There is no need to package a .love, all
the bundling is done for you. This allows you to easily develop and test on devices other than your development machine!
Primarily created and designed to be used for developing games on Steam Deck but can be easily used on other devices.
Note: steamy depends on LuaJIT's FFI capabilities to function and won't be
useful on platforms where JIT and FFI are not available.
Getting a steamy server running in your game is easy!
-- Place the steamy repo somewhere in your game's directory (like a libs folder) and require it
local steamy = require 'libs.steamy'
-- Start a steamy server in your game, listening on a host (example: 0.0.0.0)
steamy:startServer("0.0.0.0")
-- Process the steamy server in your love.update
function love.update(dt)
steamy:update()
endThat's all you need! When the server receives a game from a client it'll automatically restart LÖVE and boot the game it received.
The easiest way to send a game to a server is using the CLI.
Usage: steamy [--port <port>] [--name <name>] [--console]
[--upload-only] [--boot-menu] [--inject] [-h] [<dir>] [<host>]
Steamy Remote Launcher
Arguments:
dir Directory that contains main.lua (default: current working directory)
host IP or hostname of a server.
In client mode, this is the server to connect to.
In server mode, this is the address that will be bound to.
(default: 127.0.0.1)
Options:
--port <port> Port (default: 3621)
--name <name> Name of game zip file sent to server. (default: game)
--console Reconnect after game boot to listen for print statements.
--upload-only Don't automatically boot game after uploading.
--boot-menu Display a boot menu and run a server, allow remote clients to load/boot games.
--inject Inject steamy into games to keep server alive.
-h, --help Show this help message and exit.
There is a provided GUI boot menu designed to be a 1st class citizen on Steam Deck.
This can be used by running the steamy CLI with the --boot-menu flag. The boot menu will start a server to
listen for incoming games and load/boot them from remote clients.
The boot menu can attempt to inject a steamy server into any game it boots when the --inject flag is passed.
Since this makes a few assumptions about your games code and is generally quite hack-y this can be a bit temperamental.
It's highly recommended you manually start a server in your games code instead if possible.