Github Game-off engine selection

[LumielGR]

Hi,
Github has announced the 2017 hackathon Game-off which starts tomorrow. You can read more about it here:

We are a group of web developers that are interested to participate just for the fun of it We don't expect to create something interesting, but you never know. We are thinking about using Godot, Love2d, or Libgdx. Can someone help us make a decision or give any helpful tips? Thanks!!

[yetneverdone]

ofcourse go with LOVE!

[zorg]

Can't say i have much experience with the other two that you listed, but i enjoy löve for a variety of reasons:
- it's Lua, which i find very readable,
- it uses LuaJIT which means it can be as fast as C code, and you have an FFI available to actually use C vars and stuff (and to call functions from C libs),
- it uses SDL2 for almost everything, and OpenGL directly for graphics,
- you can edit everything down to the game loop,
- supports threading and channels to pass data between them,
- you can "bend the rules" and do 3D with it as well, if you're inclined,
- the new version will have realtime audio generating faculties (queuable source objects, nightlies are already available)
- it has both socket and enet for networking, though the latter lacks ipv6, and there's no SSL support out-of-the-box.
Can't think of any more, maybe others can.

[Sir_Silver]

Do you have experience with any/all of these frameworks/engines? Just use whatever you're familiar with unless you want to try something new?

[LumielGR]

Do you have experience with any/all of these frameworks/engines? Just use whatever you're familiar with unless you want to try something new?

Hi and thanks for all the answers! We have some experience with multiple languages, mostly Java, and I've small experience with Lua. I really like Lua so I think I will be comfortable with Love2d but I don't know what the other members will think about it. Maybe libgdx will be easier since everyone has some Java experience. But nobody has any experience with a game engine.

Also It's just for fun, so I guess we want to try something new I plan on spending about 3 hours per day

I gave godot engine a try yesterday, and managed to create a main scene that includes a second scene which is the main menu (buttons for options, credits, etc, and added a background music in .opus format) I did it in about 2-3 hours using the tutorial but I don't really like the script syntax of godot so I will give love2d a try tonight

[yetneverdone]

I gave godot engine a try yesterday, and managed to create a main scene that includes a second scene which is the main menu (buttons for options, credits, etc, and added a background music in .opus format) I did it in about 2-3 hours using the tutorial but I don't really like the script syntax of godot so I will give love2d a try tonight

Hahaha same here. i really dont get why even an object concept is called a "scene", alot of misconceptions and confusions happen. Anyways, i like how they can "compete" with unity (my opinion). Although the syntax is very similar to python, they will soon release support for c# which is awesome by the way. And oh, if they also support lua, that would really be a big win!

Enjoy with whatever you choose I promise you that this community is a loving community (pun intended)

[LumielGR]

i really dont get why even an object concept is called a "scene", alot of misconceptions and confusions happen.

wait, so how would you do that on love2d? Would you have to check the state of the game in the loop?

I just created the same main menu in libgdx, and it has the same concept of creating different Scenes. Also googling about love2d shows that some people recommend to create separate Lua classes that inherit from a "Scene".

Enjoy with whatever you choose I promise you that this community is a loving community (pun intended)

Thanks!! love you too!

[zorg]

Löve doesn't hold your hand, it doesn't have a built-in Scene/Node editor or anything.
You get a game loop, and some callbacks; that's it. (And lots of additional functions, check out the wiki.)
Code however you want to, that's, in my opinion, a good thing; not necessarily the fastest way, though.

There are libraries for various things; state managers, post-processing libs, etc. that people can use.
Löve shines when it comes to modularity without forcing people to use specific coding styles; Object-Oriented? ECS? Functional? Iterative? Recursive? A mix of these? Why not!

[yetneverdone]

wait, so how would you do that on love2d? Would you have to check the state of the game in the loop?

Good thing you asked! That's the awesome part about this framework!
As Zorg mentioned above, it is really up to you on how you want to achieve or develop your game the way you like, OOP, functional, ECS, really up to you. There's a lot of libraries out there to help you with other stuffs like animation,camera,vector,entity,object, etc. Check this collection site.

I just created the same main menu in libgdx, and it has the same concept of creating different Scenes. Also googling about love2d shows that some people recommend to create separate Lua classes that inherit from a "Scene".

Yes, you can do that, or you could just write your whole game in one big main.lua file, as we've already said, up to you.