LÖVE

I am an avid 11 year-old Scratch/Panther (Scratch modification) user, and I just recently started using Lua, and LOVE. I spent a few hours today making a small game, and I would like some feedback on it.

It is a small game where you are a ship, and you fly left-and-right, blasting away at an enemy. Sounds exciting, right? My game ruins it. I tried to make a timer, but I was having some trouble using threading (If I could receive some help here, it would be great.). The system of scoring is more endurance, as you must shoot the enemy as much as possible before getting bored.

You can't judge it by quality, can you...

Also, if you are going to recommend something, please keep it small and simple. No "A 3-D engine would be nice." Please look at the code first, as well.

Thank you.

You need to get it to become harder, and maybe have your beem to have a power limit so it can't stay on all the time but its a good start

Random things I think of when reading your code:
- Ew, commented-out code. Not cool for a release.
- Personally, I would treat the player-character as an object - make it a table which contains its data (such as x)
- You don't need a boltx if boltx always equals x. Instead of drawing it off the screen when it's off, just don't draw it at all.
- Your indenting is good. Nice work.
- You should ensure the player-character can't go off the screen. Always let the player see themself, unless it's a cutscene!

So, not horrible code, especially for a beginner. But those graphics!

You may want to check out http://love2d.org/wiki/Tutorial:Hamster_Ball for a better way to handle movement of the player. Right now your player(ship) moves at different speeds on different computers because love.update() will get called more often on fast computer but less often on a slower computer.

Motig wrote:You may want to check out http://love2d.org/wiki/Tutorial:Hamster_Ball for a better way to handle movement of the player. Right now your player(ship) moves at different speeds on different computers because love.update() will get called more often on fast computer but less often on a slower computer.

Yeah, it moves at the speed of light on mine.

Pretty good for a beginner, especially such a young one.

Most of the things I wanted to say, the others have said already.

One thing: if you hold space, and go from left to right, you can sweep the screen clean, it will become very easy that way. Can you think of a way to prevent that? (Not necessarily in code, just putting it into words can help you further).

Good stuff.

About the comments, I suggest removing the old way you did things, rather than leaving them there as comments. But congratulations on the indenting, it's mighty important.

InsertCoolUsername wrote:No "A 3-D engine would be nice."

Don't worry about that here, this is a 2D engine. There are some making 3D engines in Love, but that's relatively rare.

I think it's got everything your first game needs. You've tried a bit of the lot. Well done!

I got pretty bummed out that my games were all using default art, so I used TIGsource's amazing Assemblee stuff to make my games look prettier when developing. It's all here:

http://www.derekyu.com/tigs/assemblee/

Free art and music. Look up the drawq functions in Love for how to use the spritesheets.