Love2D: a simple, featureful game engine for most platforms
Hey, thought I'd share this with folks looking for a great, easy way to build audio games that can run on every mainstream desktop and mobile platform:
https://www.love2d.org is a Lua-based 2-D game engine that runs on Linux, Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, and the browser via Web Assembly. It's essentially a Lua interpreter with audio, networking, physics, graphics, input, and more libraries linked into a single binary. Distribution is as easy as zipping up your game and assets into a single file and either distributing that file as is, or concatenating it onto the platform-specific executable and packaging that however you like. It ships the LuaJIT interpreter by default, meaning you can access C libraries via Lua's FFI. I used that to put together a simple Speech Dispatcher TTS binding under Linux in about half an hour, and imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to do the same for Tolk/SAPI, which I'll be working on early next week.
Anyhow, I'm not the biggest Lua fan. I'm still tripping over 1-based array indices and a few additional gotchas. But I've been having lots of luck building an audio game in it for the last week or so. I've pulled in a few libraries for math operations, an entity component system, and a GUI. But other than those, I've managed to stick with the APIs Love ships out of the box. It's only 2-D of course, but most of our games are 2-D anyway, and the biggest obstacles to 3-D use are graphical. If you don't mind handling the math and physics yourself, there's no reason you can't represent game objects in 3-D and turn off the physics. Physics uses Box2D, so 3-D realistic physics would require something else.
Anyhow, I thought I'd share this for anyone struggling to put a bunch of pieces together to build a good audio game engine. I'm not going to hand-hold anyone through getting it installed or learning Lua, but I'll probably put together a series of blog posts on how to build a simple audio game with it, and will almost certainly open source at least whatever TTS module I get going. If I or someone else can get it working on MacOS, I don't see why folks couldn't port their Love games to the Mac, though you'd almost certainly want to at least have access to a Mac for testing.
Enjoy.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
