RetroLove

[jonthysell]

Hi all,

I discovered LOVE this past weekend while trying to build my own simple 2D game framework from scratch. LOVE is way cooler than anything I could have built in my free time, so I jumped straight into making some simple retro games:

https://github.com/jonthysell/RetroLove

So far I've got playable clones of Pong and Breakout - I love how quickly I was able to get them up and running and it was a blast to add touch support and push it to my phone. I figure a couple more games to get used to the framework and workflow, then I'll start working on something original. The last original game I made was a Mario-style platformer in Java over a decade ago so I'm a little rusty game programming.

/jon

[grunk]

Really neat idea! They both play well. Cool you added sounds too! I think making clones of old games is the best way to learn game programming. It's really fun and it often doesn't require much work to make the game into something new and cool.
You are drawing everything on a smaller canvas than the window, then scaling it to fit the screen. This is certainly a good idea for retro games like this one but, the graphics become a little blurry the way it is done right now. Especially the text. This is because of anti-aliasing I think. You can make your graphics look more crisp by setting the filter on the small canvas like so:

Code: Select all

canvas:setFilter("nearest", "nearest")

Just a thought though, it might be that you want it to look the way it does now

[jonthysell]

Thanks, I applied the filter, and it does look better for retro graphics, though I think I'll have to find a better bitmap font for the future.

My plan for an original game is definitely low-res, which is why I'm playing around with scaling small resolutions now. I'm thinking maybe 256x144, as if you had a 16:9 gameboy. At this point I'm leaning toward a classic side scrolling beat 'em up.

[kbmonkey]

Good work. These are classic games and they play pretty well. Tetris is another game I enjoy remaking because it involves array transforms and some easy collision detection

[jonthysell]

I've added my take on Asteroids. It's pretty much done, I just need to figure out what makes sense for touch controls and possibly add continuing levels / gaining extra lives to make it more interesting.

[davisdude]

Looks nice!

Looking at your code, this line and other similar ones aren't needed. Instead, you should use love.math.random; LOVE automatically seeds the random number generator. For pros and cons of love.math.random vs math.random, see this thread.

[jonthysell]

Wasn't sure if I should start a new thread or not, but I've released RetroLove (all 3 games in one app) on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... .retrolove

It's not an amazing set of clones, but it is my first release on a mobile app store of any kind.