Well, I participated once again in Ludum Dare and managed to succeed in creating a game (unlike last time). The game I created is called Amongst Shadows, and you can play it here on my website, or rate/comment on it at its Ludum Dare page.
Anyway, on with the post-mortem.
The theme was "You are the Villain"; I had hoped it would be "End of the World", given the date and that I had a good idea for it, but that was not to be. Now this was a somewhat difficult theme for me, because I hate playing characters of the evil archetype; I wasn't going to create some mindless mass-murder simulator. I decided to make the morality of your actions somewhat ambiguous. You're on an infiltration job for some mysterious organisation, you're probably a mercenary, making you morally grey. Furthermore, it isn't clear whether this organisation is good or bad, though it's hinted that they're bad.
Read moreThis is just a post announcing that Ammo 1.0 has been released (changelog). After a couple months in the 0.x range, I feel it's ready to be pushed up to 1.0. Hopefully soon I can create some tutorials for the library; the documentation is complete and up-to-date, but documentation isn't particularly good at conveying the big picture.
Anyway, if you've got any feedback on the library, please let me know.
Read moreAs an example of creating custom data structures in Lua, I thought I'd give a little demonstration of a linked lists implementation. Note that this isn't going to be an in-depth tutorial or anything; for the most part I'll just be showing pieces of the code.
Linked lists are wonderful data structures, perfect if you need to efficiently add, remove, and iterate through elements. The one trade off is that you can't find an element by an index.
Read moreThis announcement post is a bit overdue, but, better late than never. A short while ago, I released the first version (0.1) of Ammo, my organisational library for LÖVE. Its current version is 0.1.3. I plan to let the library stay in the 0.x range for a while as it's tested by me and any others who use it.
Along with the core library, there's a number of extensions available. The one I'm most excited about is ammo-debug, a versatile, highly customisable debugging console. It provides stuff like output logging, a command system, info graphs, and even simple live coding support. At present its version is 0.2.
Read moreWhen making a game in LÖVE, you'll probably end up needing to customise the mouse cursor. As I recently had to do just that, I thought I'd make a quick tutorial on it. If you want an example cursor, here's the crosshair I'm using in a game right now.
Now, all of what we need is contained within the love.mouse module. The first step is to hide the mouse with love.mouse.setVisible. You'll probably want to do this in love.load:
If you haven't read the previous parts (one, two and three), then I'd highly recommend doing so. For reference, here's a list of the parts in this series:
Command line arguments are stored in the arg table. For example, if we had the script foo.lua:
If you haven't read part one and two already, I'd highly recommend doing so. For reference, here's a list of the parts in this series:
In part one I stated that Lua has "braces of a sort in the form of keywords like then and do." Much like a language with C-based syntax, these "braces" represent blocks, which are essentially sequences of statements. An example of some blocks in Lua:
If you haven't read part one already, I'd highly recommend doing so. For reference, here's a list of the parts in this series:
Tables are essentially associative arrays which can have keys and values of any type. Tables are incredibly flexible, and are the only data structure in Lua, so knowledge of them is crucial.
Read moreIn this series we'll be taking a look at most everything you should know to program in Lua. The series is targeted at people who already know how to program, and as such I'll aim to be brief in my explanations.
Here's an overview of the four parts the compose the series:
In case you didn't already know, Lua is an interpreted programming language. It's fast, flexible, embeddable, simple, and easy to learn. You can get Lua from its download page.
Read moreWell, it's been some time since I've released a test build for Illusive Dreams hasn't it? Work on it has been very slow lately; both I and Jeremiah haven't done all that much on it during the last few months. Nevertheless, a lot has happened to the game since the last test build, and I thought it best to release a new one before I go off to Brisbane. You can find the build here: /games/illusive-dreams/test. Any feedback, suggestions, etc., would be most welcome.
Read moreI thought I'd share a few quick tips on getting more ratings, which I've picked up in my experience with Ludum Dare. Please note, I'm not putting this down as fact or anything, but merely expressing my own opinion.
Yeah, this one's kind of obvious by now I'd say. Your "coolness level" increases by one per game you rate, and the cooler you are, the higher chance you have of getting rated. Games are picked for people to rate both by how high the author's coolness is, and how low the number of ratings are.
Read moreWell, I think it's about time I made my Ludum Dare 23 postmortem. First of all, I blame not posting in a long time on my seemingly inherent laziness. Procrastination is an easy trap for me it seems, but that's another topic altogether.
Back on subject, the latest Ludum Dare took place between April 21st and 24th, with the main competition ending on the 23rd. It just so happens that this event was Ludum Dare's 10th anniversary, which is pretty awesome.
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