LABWS

[wormyrocks]

Hi all! New user, first post, all that good stuff. Been forever since I've been on a Web forum. Social media is eating the Internet and my attention span.

I'm announcing my first-ever project in Löve: a remake of a silly little game that I made two years ago in Slick2D: LABWS. Follow the link to see what it stands for (can we curse on this forum?).
The intent is for this thread to serve both as a place where I can give cool updates on the game's development and hopefully screenshots, as well as a place where I can post periodic questions that reveal how little I know about the language.

If you want the definitive version of the game, definitely grab the Slick2D version from the link above rather than the attached .love file: the new version is only about 10 days into development and it's much buggier and not nearly as refined (insofar as such an adjective applies to the original game at all); the original was pretty close to a finished project for the brief little arcade game that it was, although it's definitely rough around the edges as you play. Difficulty increases algorithmically, so it becomes unplayable after about 10 minutes - the good thing is the fact that that's well past the point that most people give up.

Anyways, two years later I finally have time to come back to it and decided to finally make the game I wanted to design in the first place, so I brought some friends on board as programmers and we're working on expanding the game out with better graphics, more powerups and a ton of new concepts. The eventual hope is that the final version of this game will go beyond the simple arcade trappings of the original version in some cool and unexpected ways. The issue is that we need to learn Love2D first. This is both of our first experiences with Lua and we're basically coming from your bog-standard-these-days Python/Java/C++ background, so there are a couple of things that we're both still getting used to, particularly in the optimization department.

So my first question to pose here is the following: is there a good way for me to see what it is that I'm doing that makes the Löve game in its current revision run so inconsistently on certain machines? I have a frame rate that fluctuates wildly and I'm not really sure why. I suspect it has something to do with collisions, but I'm not sure. I read through the Löve wiki page on optimizing code and realized that I'm not really sure where to start, so someone that could either take a quick look at the code or point me to some sort of debugging tool that can help to pick out bottlenecks would be immensely appreciated. A .love file is attached (again, this has only been in development for about a week and a half). FWIW, we are currently using the MiddleClass, HardonCollider, and SLAM libraries.

Thanks so much in advance for any and all help, and I'm thrilled to get back into the game development scene!

~wormyrocks

[Ulydev]

This is shit.
Literally.

[Roland_Yonaba]

This is shit.
Literally.

Wow.
I have seen a poop class in the source.
A poop class.
Wow.

[qubodup]

What a sweet ass-spaceship.


http://youtu.be/Fh1ryLJdODo

[Germanunkol]

Haha, I don't want to know how you made the sound-effects

It's a cool idea to have the exhaust be the "shots". Really forces the player to re-adjust...

[wormyrocks]

Haha, thanks all!!

Sound effects are all from freesound.org; but I think they actually come from a guy who farts into a microphone. and yep, I think the mechanic is a winner; as dumb as it is there's a reason that I revisited it after two years.

I would encourage anyone who is interested in playing a finished version of this game or sharing it with their friends to pick up the original (linked to in the OP); the .love file I posted is really just me asking for advice on optimization and basically to see how well I'm doing getting started out with Lua. I figure I've made at least a few heinous optimization/memory allocation errors and I'd rather catch them early on than wait until a few more weeks into development and have absolutely no idea what is causing all the slowdowns.

Also, eventually the gameplay will become a little more complex than even the 'complete' version 1.0. The eventual intent is for the 2.0 remake to start out with this patently stupid premise that gradually unfolds into a more and more intricate game universe, which will hopefully draw in people that picked up the game for a laugh and become more and more involved. (Think Frog Fractions). But we're not there yet.

Anyways, any and all feedback and suggestions are welcome, and I'm glad you guys are getting a kick out of it!