Heya! this is a project that I have been working on for about a year now, but only a total of an actual week or two of work.

Last year, inspired by kenta cho's 50 games, I made a web based editor to use his micro game library. I was the only person that ended up using it, and with a year of hindsight, I can totally see why. There were a ton of just totally annoying things about it, that most people would never be willing to overcome.

That said, there were some cool things too. The limitations on graphics, level layouts, music and more were just really clever. I can make a fully functioning game loop in about 10 minutes with it, and start iterating on my ideas. It is just so nice to work in a way that is fluid.

So I resurrected the project. I ported everything over to a c / lua lib, which builds to the web using emscripten. I am planning on making a pack of 15 small games (think about the scale and scope of flappy bird or something), and put it out on iOS. I have the editor still running on the web which is fun, and that will be an ongoing aim, so other people can take what I did and make their own games with it.

So, my goal this week is to finish 2 small games, and work out some underlying issues. I have one done already, and one in progress.

some kind of momentum based skating game where you need to collect flowers. Blue flowers give you points, red flowers flip you to attack mode, so you can clean up enemies.

dual stick thing? I dunno, just started playing around with this one today.

Well the past 2 weeks have been interesting. I went through two different game engines, then finally settled on love2d. I really like love2d a bunch, but was excited to make everything in my own engine. Ah well, next time. I managed to port everything over from my own engine to love2d in about a day, and got some of the cool tech implemented as well.

The first thing that I did was get my synth engine in. Right now there is just an 808 bassdrum, snare drum, and closed hat, but the tech layer is there for me to add as many modules as I want. It uses package.loadlib on desktop to bring in the dylib (osx dll) that I have built of my c code. Luckily I can just open up a new audio stream without any issues using SDL_openAudio and start chucking my buffers over to it.

The other neat bit of tech I have is a webserver that runs on the iOS device builds. With the server I can just post lua files directly from my text editor, and have it reload lua data without needing to recompile and send to the device.

My main love.update function that hotswaps lua code looks like the following:

function love.update(dt)
    -- check to make sure we are running the webserver
    if webserverLoadString then
        local webserverString = webserverLoadString();
        -- if so, bring the data in
        if webserverString ~= nil then
            local serverChunk = loadstring(webserverString)
            local noerr, res = pcall(serverChunk)
            if not noerr then
                print("error: ", res)
            else
                -- attach the incoming arcade game to the current state if it is the right type
                if mainState.class.name == "ArcadeState" then
                    mainState:remove(mainState.game);
                    res = res.start()
                    mainState.game = mainState:add(res);
                end
            end
        end
    end
end

on the c side, I am just running a webserver that queues up the data that has been sent to it, and waits until lua asks for it.

I suspect this could be built as an extension that runs on the desktop as well, but I haven't found a good crossplatform webserver yet. If anyone has any tips for stuff that isn't like a zillion c files, I am happy to hear about it. Even better if it already has lua bindings.

wow, almost a month eh? I have been heads down on contract work, so haven't had to much time to work on this. Terri Vellman did some cool animations for one of the games, and I got inspired, so overhauled the graphics for another one of the games.

I am at 3 games now, which is super pitiful for the 2 months or whatever I have been working on this. I think I am gonna scuttle the overworld / story driven thing, unless I can come up with a cheaper way of handling it, and have it just be the internal games for now :/