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TIC-80

Fantasy computer for making, playing and sharing tiny games. · By Nesbox

Interactive development?

A topic by technomancy created May 28, 2018 Views: 605 Replies: 2
Viewing posts 1 to 3
(+1)

One of the big things I miss from coding games in LÖVE is the ability to interact with my games while they're running. It's invaluable for debugging to be able to just pause the game and inspect and change the contents of various game state tables.

Imagine if when you press ESC to get to the console you could run a command like `lua print(state.abc)` to see the contents of a game's table, or run `lua state.abc = 481` and then run `lua TIC()` to see the effect your change has on gameplay. (If we want to get really fancy we could add a `resume` command, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.)

First of all, is this a good idea? I understand that having support for multiple languages complicates this. I could take a shot at implementing this for the languages that run on the Lua runtime (including MoonScript and Fennel) but implementing it for JS or Wren is beyond me. If it's agreed to be a thing worth doing I'd be happy to put in the work to see it since interactive development is very important to me, and it's difficult for me to work without it since I've been so spoiled.

Developer(+1)

I like the idea, it looks very useful even if it will be implemented only for the lua based languages.

(+1)

If anyone's following along here, this was added: https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/pull/611