"Juice It or Lose It" in LÖVE

[jimmytheleaf]

Hello, this is my first post! I wanted to share something I did in case folks find it useful.

Late last year, inspired by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho's "Juice It Or Lose It" video, I put together a LÖVE version of the "Juicy Breakout" game they originally did in Flash.

A good deal of coding, and three or four rounds of full refactoring later, I came up with an implementation that I’m moderately happy with. It can be found on github here.



Features implemented include:

Specific Juicy Features

• Splash Screen that bounces in
• Bricks and Paddle that drop in, with jitter and elastic shape/rotation scaling
• Bricks that flash colors, and rotate/scale-down/get launched off into background in the direction the ball hits them
• Ball that has elastic shape scaling, color-change, and rotation on collisions
• Paddle and Walls that elastically bounce when hit by ball
• Background that flashes colors on certain ball collision events
• Confetti particles that eject from ball upon collisions
• Flashing “You Win” text when all bricks are destroyed

Support code to get us there:

• A backend Entity-Component system for managing entities, along with basic CNF-query class for retrieving entities with particular components
• Basic movement, input, collision, time, state, statistics-tracking, and rendering components / systems
• Behavior system for adding special frame-by-frame logic to entities
• Message system for announcing events and allowing entities to register their own response to events
• Emitter component / system (used stupidly for particles here, but generic for any kind of entity)
• Camera system (doesn’t get much advanced use here)
• Tweening and Scheduling systems
• Lua ports of a few basic Java-like collections classes
• Implementation of a Pool util class

What I used / was influenced by:

Over the course of development, I refactored the codebase I was working on a few times to continually clean things up. Eventually I settled on creating a basic Entity-Component framework inspired by Artemis and posts by Adam Martin. Just about everything in the game is an Entity; every data attribute is packaged in a Component; and everything that happens to update or react to those Components happens in a System. For a basic overview of the theory behind this, check out this post.

When coming up with my own scheduler / tween systems, I was heavily influenced by code in VRLD's HUMP libraries. Other specific code I directly used can be found on the github page.


If you like what's there, I have more LÖVE experiments in my main love repository on github.

[Germanunkol]

Oh my gosh, it's just as disco-y as the original!

Good work. I really appreciated some of their ideas, but all of the effects put together at once always seemed way too much to me. But it's a nice implementation!

Which reminds me. I still have to juice up the UI for our game...

[TheScriptan]

I like how you made this game like faster and more lively. It doesn't look like just a casual game for me at least.
Anyways I found few bugs here. First one is if you press escape a lot it crashes the game and second one maybe it's not a bug it just needs the implementation I think. Now you can press space whenever you want, you should make it, when ball is out of the game and you should make a random direction for that ball, because he always flies into the same direction! Still game looks awesome and that splash screen tho'!