From the sounds of it, you are trying to save your 'lovechive' with an .exe extension; your archiver is probably 'helpfully' assuming you meant to create a self extractor, which you didn't.
Okay, lets start by talking about how runable 'lovechives' work:
When love.exe
starts up, it first checks its own name, if its called something other than love
or love.exe
it immediately checks to see if there is somethng stuck to its end. if there is, then it tries to interpret it as if it were a 'lovechive'.
So basically, we want to stick a zip-file to love's bottom (don't worry, it likes it).
- Start by creating an ordinary zip archive of you game directory.
- Remember to check for anything you don't actually mean to ship; plenty of love games have gone out containing backup copies of the source code, test artwork, and peoples' shopping lists. Don't be a statistic.
- The filename is irrelevant for what were are doing here, so don't worry about the usual step of renaming it to a
.love
. just make sure that what you have is an plain-ol' ordinary zip. - The next step depends on your host platform, but basically you now need to do the whole "stick it to love's bottom' part now, generally this is done from the command-line:
- On windows, the command is:
copy /b love.exe+YourGame.zip TheGame.exe
Wherelove.exe
is the name of the main 'love' executableYourGame.zip
is the name of zip file containing your game, andTheGame.exe
is what you want the final game executable to be named. - On Linux or OSX, the command is:
cat love YourGame.zip > TheGame
Wherelove
is the name of the main 'love' executable,YourGame.zip
is the name of zip file containing your game, andTheGame
is what you want the final game executable to be named.
- On windows, the command is:
These substituting the relevant filenames should let you produce versions for Linux, and Windows (All I know about making 'merged' OSX Apps is that its more complicated.)
For the record, it is utterly trivial to extract files from the 'merged' game. Usually nothing more than changing the file extension, sometimes not even that. And no, zip encryption doesn't help here; it won't run because love can't read the archive. (quite sensibly, really.)
Finally, If you are distributing to the Love community, they generally prefer that you just give them the 'lovechive.'