First projects

[Snookered]

Hi all, very new here and to love2d/lua in general. I've only started reading up and playing around with my own code in the last week or so. I've started coding a stupid clicker game as a proof of concept, and have a couple of features (buttons, counters, clickers) working mostly the way I want them. Unfortunately it feels like it takes a LONG time to make little progress. I guess I'm wondering how long it took some of you to complete your first silly projects to satisfaction, and what kind of tricks, libraries, tutorials you thought helped you the most to get there.

[KayleMaster]

Hi and welcome to the forums!

Here's some libraries to help you out:

• hump - Helper Utilities for a Multitude of Problems ( gamestate is really useful )

• Lume - A collection of functions for Lua, geared towards game development

• middleclass - Object-orientation for Lua

• HooECS, lovetoys & others - Entity Component System for Love2d

• love-nuklear - Lightweight immediate mode GUI for LÖVE games, although I'm currently having problems with it

You can find each of these if you google their name and love2d/lua. You can find more just by googling the system and love2d.
For example: Love2d GUI
My result: https://love2d.org/wiki/Graphical_User_Interface

I like to make big games, but so far, in a week and a half I have a chunking system for infinite terrain set up, considering I've never done those before.

[erasio]

Pretty good write up.

For libraries. The most recent page(s) of the tools and libraries page in combination with this wiki page:

https://love2d.org/wiki/Category:Libraries

Should contain the very strong majority of interesting libraries and tools available.

Some noteworthy (not yet mentioned tools):

Bump.lua - simple aabb (unrotated rectangle) collision detection.

HardonCollider - simple collision detection (with circles and polygons)

Imgui lua bindings - great Ui library with few customization options. Basically a good tool for custom tools and debugging Ui.

Also. Yes. Creating a game takes forever. Try to get a prototype going quickly to verify it's fun. But for polished, nicely written code. You'll need months even for simple things.

My first several games I threw away after a month or two because I made too many mistakes and didn't have the motivating to start over with the same game.

My prototypes usually take around 40 - 80 hours. At which point I decide to either scrap it or rewrite most of it and build a more solid version for months to come.

My first complete game took about 1 year (at ~30 hours a week) with a small team. After I've created half a dozen or so prototypes before.

Point being. Don't worry. It does take time. Just stick to it!

[KayleMaster]

Yeah, I don't have collision detection yet so I missed those

Anyways, it's worth it in the end. If anything, it teaches you how to build a proper architecture with maintanable code (I'm still struglling on this part), which is not an easy task.