My first project, advice and tips welcome!

[ninwa]

Note: For friends I may have linked here who need help installing the game you must first download the Love platform installer from http://www.love2d.org. After it's installed download and open the latest version of the game from below. Welcome to playing with Love!

Hey all,

Before yesterday (Oct. 10th) I had never written a line of LUA in my life. I've written in a few other languages and something about Love2D really appealed to me. I had to try it out, and so far, it's been a whole boat load of fun. I've decided to write a side scrolling space shooter with my girlfriend (she's the "idea director" ) dedicated to our little pup beagle. I was hoping a few people would try it out and give any advice/pointers that I should keep in mind going forward.

Screenshot:


Tips

• Try using the laser on the cat fliers
• Missiles work best on the urples, try to time your attacks against their firing rate!
• Final boss will reflect projectiles with his shield!

Controls

• Arrow Keys - Movement
• Spacebar - Fire
• 'r' - Toggles projectile type
• 's' - Toggle audio (new)

Downloads:

• Current - v0.9 - http://www.josephbleau.com/SpaceScout_v0-9.love
  • Turning audio on and off now fixed (press 's' to toggle)
  • First level final boss completed.
  • New boss minion: "Obey"
• All old versions links and changelog found here: http://www.josephbleau.com/ss_changelog.txt

As with any project, I need to set some goals for myself. A point at which I will go, "Ok. This is done. I will not add another line of code to this." Frankly, if I don't, I will never stop working on something. Here are my goals:

Goals:

• At least 15 types of enemies.
• At least 6 levels.
• One "super enemy" at the end of each level.
• Interface for swapping projectile player is using.
• Menu system and game over screen

[TechnoCat]

Pretty sweet game, especially a first game. Your dog's gun shoots crazy fast. lol

Your code is clean and fairly well commented. I just don't get what "main.love" is doing in there.

[ninwa]

Ah just disregard that, it's probably from when I was playing around with getting Love packages to work. I will make sure that's not in there the next update I put out. I wrote a little batch file that just packages everything in my dev folder and makes the .love.

Thanks for checking it out and I'm glad you enjoyed it. And actually, the pups firing rate is something that was a lot slower earlier and I plan on modifying in the future.

I hope to add:

• Enemies dropping Bones and their projectiles
• Pressing 'r' will toggle projectiles with a small UI at the bottom
• At least 10 levels and 20 different monsters
• A soundtrack (going to compose it myself, or at least try, hehe)
• A game menu that lets you choose which level you want to play after having unlocked it
• A game-over screen & continues

[spirulence]

If you're looking for some help with the soundtrack, I'd be happy to oblige. I'm not a musician by trade, but I do write my own brand of electronic music as a hobby.

Here's some examples:
http://www.archive.org/download/AMidsum ... capade.mp3
http://www.archive.org/download/NewSqua ... Square.mp3

[TechnoCat]

Okay, so I notice you are using a lot of table indexing with numbers. And then referencing the next one using table#+1 and so on.
And then to compensate for the big loops that might come out of this, I saw you doing a cleanup function that checks for cases when everything is not visible.

You might want to look into using functions like "table.insert()" and "table.remove()" and then a "for i,v ipairs(table) do" for tables and set references that are off screen to nill. Lua has a garbage collector it calls itself.

[ninwa]

Okay, so I notice you are using a lot of table indexing with numbers. And then referencing the next one using table#+1 and so on.
And then to compensate for the big loops that might come out of this, I saw you doing a cleanup function that checks for cases when everything is not visible.

You might want to look into using functions like "table.insert()" and "table.remove()" and then a "for i,v ipairs(table) do" for tables and set references that are off screen to nill. Lua has a garbage collector it calls itself.

This is exactly the kind of information I was hoping would come out of this. I KNEW there was a better way of doing that, but I rushed coding to get it to work. Once I had something that worked "well enough" I didn't bother reconsidering it. Thank you very much. There is actually a few things in the code that was limited by the way I was doing it (for example, multi-staged waves with tons of enemies) because after so long the tables become far too large (especially projectiles) and I consider that unacceptable.

[ninwa]

If you're looking for some help with the soundtrack, I'd be happy to oblige. I'm not a musician by trade, but I do write my own brand of electronic music as a hobby.

Here's some examples:
http://www.archive.org/download/AMidsum ... capade.mp3
http://www.archive.org/download/NewSqua ... Square.mp3

Fantastic tracks, definitely a lot better than anything I will likely come up with. I plan on trying though. Just to say "I made everything here " I might bother you with some questions in the future.

[TechnoCat]

Oops, I meant "for i,v in ipairs(table) do", but hopefully you are reading about that in a reference already.

[ninwa]

Oops, I meant "for i,v in ipairs(table) do", but hopefully you are reading about that in a reference already.

You bet. I rewrote all of the code to use this instead. I like it so much better. Here's my new cleanup function.

Code: Select all

function performCleanup()
		-- Remove dead enemies, but only if
		-- their fade timer (controls their death animation) 
		-- has expired.
		for i,v in ipairs(enemies) do
			if( (v["alive"] == false) and
				(love.timer.getTime() - v["fade_timer"] > 3)
			  ) then
				table.remove(enemies,i)
			end
		end

		-- Remove off-screen projectiles from
		-- our projectile table.
		for i, v in ipairs(projectiles) do
			if( not(v[1] > -70)    and 
			    not(v[1] < 1000) ) then
				table.remove(projecties,i)
			end
		end
end

Thanks again.

[TechnoCat]

your background doesn't tile correctly. Uncertain if this is actually off by a pixel or if it just needs to be drawn with math.floor on the x value.