Love Game Maker

[ivan]

I have to admit that I didn't read everything in this topic but I get your idea.
When it comes to frameworks and game engines there is always a tradeoff between ease of use and power.
I used to think that the more high level a framework is the better.
Sprites, layers, collisions etc, initially it makes sense to handle that stuff with a "do it all" framework.
But in practice it puts a lot of design constraints (ex: expandability, modularity) and creates consequent logical problems (ex: coupling).
My major gripe with high level frameworks like GameMaker is that - although it may be easy to get something moving on the screen, it's a long way from making a commercial game.
Especially if the game involves AI (Chess) or well defined rules (Solitaire).
I think an editor (like GameMaker) would be excellent in very narrow domains like platformers or overhead action games.
In my opinion with visual editors: the narrower, the domain the better.

[Radfordhound]

I have to admit that I didn't read everything in this topic but I get your idea.
When it comes to frameworks and game engines there is always a tradeoff between ease of use and power.
I used to think that the more high level a framework is the better.
Sprites, layers, collisions etc, initially it makes sense to handle that stuff with a "do it all" framework.
But in practice it puts a lot of design constraints (ex: expandability, modularity) and creates consequent logical problems (ex: coupling).
My major gripe with high level frameworks like GameMaker is that - although it may be easy to get something moving on the screen, it's a long way from making a commercial game.
Especially if the game involves AI (Chess) or well defined rules (Solitaire).
I think an editor (like GameMaker) would be excellent in very narrow domains like platformers or overhead action games.
In my opinion with visual editors: the narrower, the domain the better.

Yeah, I definitely agree. I don't really think LGM will be "The perfect tool" for game development. No visual editor really can be, no matter how hard you try. Eventually, some guy's going to come along and try to do something only to realize that, quite simply, he can't with that editor without going out of his way.

Though I do agree that editors tend to be better when made for narrower domains, I feel that as long as a frontend for a game engine stays extremely close to the root of the engine, well, you can do pretty much anything in that editor that the engine allows. The farther you stray from that engine's root, the more limited your application becomes.

I'm trying to make LGM as customize able as possible by making it completely open-source as well as using super-simple systems for tasks such as action-loading, (The actions are all just text files numerically named under the "actions" folder containing one line of text in a special format telling the engine how the action acts, and then your action's actual lua code. Nothing more to it!) so hopefully this helps eliminate the issue of being "bound by the editor". Though, again, nothing's perfect and I don't ever true-ly think LGM will be.

It's really more designed around teaching kids to code. If a kid uses it and learns enough about Lua/LOVE 2D from it to move onto something else... well, then the editor has succeeded! It doesn't matter whether they actually use it or not, as long as they learn skills they can use else-where.

[purplehuman]

How will it make the executables? I mean will it require LÖVE to be installed, or will you distribute LÖVE in it? Is it going to make executables, or just create the love archive? Could you add a way to obfuscate the code for people who want it (I don't)?

Just curious. I'm trying to figure out what I would do if I made this project myself. I won't, but I'm just curious.

[Radfordhound]

How will it make the executables? I mean will it require LÖVE to be installed, or will you distribute LÖVE in it? Is it going to make executables, or just create the love archive? Could you add a way to obfuscate the code for people who want it (I don't)?

Just curious. I'm trying to figure out what I would do if I made this project myself. I won't, but I'm just curious.

Love comes with it, although I've already implemented an option in the settings to allow the user to change the love directory, so you can change the version it uses if necessary (For example, if an update to love comes out and the editor hasn't yet updated to include that version.).

And it already creates love archives! (Real buggy, temporary, limited archives... but, still, archives that run correctly in love 2d!) It doesn't yet build executables, but that's been in the plans since day 1 (There's already a button for it and everything!), and it reeeaallyyy won't be hard to implement. Trust me. I've built executables for love 2d games before. Implementing a feature to build it for the user'll take, maybe, 10 minutes? If that?

Best part is, not only will it support both executable and archives, but as we all know, love 2d is multi-platform! So, guess what? It'll be able to compile binaries for all supported love platforms! (So far the platforms on my 'todo list' are Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and Android. Although I still have yet to try the community love iOS port... so if that's as good as the community Android port, I'll check it out and see if I can manage to support that too! ) All from one PC running one OS!

As for code obfuscation, I haven't dived too deeply into that so I don't know how difficult a process it is for multiple platforms, although from what I've seen it seems to be pretty simple to at least get basic obfuscation working (There are even multiple open-source tools for it!), so I'm 95% sure that'll be an option as well.

[purplehuman]

I haven't tried it, but from what you told, I can see it attracting beginners. Good luck.

[Radfordhound]

I haven't tried it, but from what you told, I can see it attracting beginners. Good luck.

Thank you!

[Muris]

Well I could be wrong, but up to my knowledge you cannot develop with Mono to mobile devices without Xamarin, maybe this has changed since I didn't anymore find any info about Xamarin on their page.

The thing with mono is, which is not really mentioned well in their site, but it does cost money to port to ios/android devices. I kind of hate their way of marketing that you can port for everything, but you really have to do quite some searching to realise that you actually do need Xamarin for porting to mobile devices.

The good thing about it is though, that the price of Xamarin or price models of using Xamarin has changed. It used to be something like 300 dollars per mobile platform, but now it is only 25 dollars per month. You can develop freely to desktop devices but you can forget the mobile part with free developing, unless you go to something like Unity with C#, which is free for quite a while, but has its own catches.

Edit: Now that I looked the project bit more in depth, I noticed that you are making a C# program that creates lua code, so I suppose the whole point of xamarin thing doesn't really matter at all.

[iyzsong]

That's cool!
But there does have a lot of works wating you...

[bobbyjones]

Am I the only one who thinks love game maker should be made in lua?

[arampl]

Nope. There's one more.