Woo, Ludum Dare!

I’ll be using this opportunity to get familiar with Moai. I’ve already got the windows host built, Zerobrane set up to work with it, and a project folder synced with github and ready for the first commit. My entire experience with Moai to date consists of drawing a single image on the screen sans-game-loop, so this should be fun. My goals for the weekend are to jump start learning Moai and, of course, to make a game.

So without further adeu, I present my entry for LD29:

Title: Unknown!
Theme: Unknown!
Desc: Unknown!
SCM: https://github.com/sclark39/ld29
Engine: Moai
Language: Lua
IDE: ZeroBrane
Other Tools: Audacity, Chronolapse, Pickle, Photoshop, Programmer’s Notepad, Microsoft Excel, Scrivener, Trello, Beyond Compare, TortoiseGit, mIRC, Pidgin, a notebook, and a whiteboard

😉

I can’t wait to fill in all the unknowns. I’m also planning (we’ll see how it goes) to do the October Challenge in June, so I’m extra motivated to do something awesome this weekend and get a good head start on my own personal June challenge.

On my reasoning for selecting Moai: in past Ludum Dare’s I’ve used HaxePunk and Love2D, but I’ve chosen Moai for this one because it is open source, can build a Windows client, and is more easily ported to mobile platforms. I didn’t like HaxePunk much because of the AS language, but it was great that it could be run in the browser and I believe was very portable. I really liked using Love2D, but mostly I just liked writing the whole game in Lua. Love was good for prototyping, but is not designed for production-ready code nor designed to be portable. Although there were some web clients for Love, they were not mature and I couldn’t get either of my past two LD entries to run through it. Not having a web version isn’t great for LD because it adds another barrier for people to actually try my game. I’ve seen a Moai game running in a web host, so I’m hoping to have better luck with this. I’ll have to see if I can get that sorted when submission time comes. In general, Moai is a bit more complicated to use because the rendering is handled by a separate thread, but game code is still all written Lua, which I appreciate; and it should be more realistic to finish a game post-compo if I start with this (and actually still have it be performant on mobile platforms [cross fingers]).

I’ll likely make a time-lapse of the weekend, but it may only be for my use. Depends how good I am at keeping personal info off my main screen.

I’ll be on IRC, GTalk, and Twitter.