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Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

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Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#71

Post by aspenmayer »

cableshaft wrote: post #64
KeplerBoy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, making money with games is hard and I guess you have to have ads unless you strike it big. I just wish mobile gaming went a different way, but that's not the world we live in. Best of luck to you and your project.

I'm also planning to release it on Steam, and it will be an upfront cost there. Also after paying the 'remove ads' price, which will likely be cheaper than the price I'm planning to sell it for on Steam (thinking $2.99 for mobile right now), the game will effectively become the same as the Steam version anyway. I agree that it sucks. I wish I could just put $2.99 as the price and it would still have a chance of selli…

Have you looked into distributing on Apple Arcade? I haven’t myself but it seems like it might be another potential source of income that doesn’t rely on ads/in-app purchases. I think Google Play has a similar game service?

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#72

Post by trevorhinesley »

rollcat wrote: post #65
trevorhinesley wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DragonRuby did it: https://dragonruby.org/

And many other frameworks did it too. LÖVE decided it's out of scope, and that's a 100% valid choice, considering the breadth and complexity of the problem. They still went quite far in ensuring it's no more difficult than it actually needs to be. Similar with e.g. cross-compiling Go programs (unfortunately, no cgo-less, cross-platform framework for interacting with windowing systems/video hardware exists).

Yes, but most other engines are much larger scope and fundamentally different purpose than LÖVE. DragonRuby, however, is in the same camp: code-first, scripting language (Ruby vs Lua), beginner-to-expert friendly. So my point was there are (at least one) project(s) very similar in purpose and size/scope to LÖVE that did solve for cross platform.

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#73

Post by vunderba »

trevorhinesley wrote: post #40
vunderba wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm. DragonRuby seems to be a closed source proprietary game engine (at least as far as I can tell). With open source engines like Love2D / Godot / PhaserJS / Pyxel becoming more popular - this may be a deterrent for many devs on HN. Something else to consider is traction, if you get stuck in DragonRuby there's probably not a huge amount of docs/tutorials around it. That being said, it does seem like they have a pre…

> DragonRuby seems to be a closed source proprietary game engine Yes, but check out: https://docs.dragonruby.org/#/misc/faq?id=dragonruby-is-not-... And https://docs.dragonruby.org/#/misc/faq?id=what-if-i-build-so... > If you get stuck in DragonRuby there’s probably not a huge amount of docs/tutorials around it. You’d be surprised. The docs are extensive and there are sample games galore in the distro. https://docs.d…

I totally get it - I'm not definitely not casting aspersions on their choice to go commercial with it. I just feel like with the insane Unity pricing restructuring (which they ultimately rolled back) - a lot of game devs have been pretty gun shy about investing in another proprietary engine.

That said, we can always use more game engines / frameworks!

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#74

Post by ehnto »

mattfrommars wrote: post #42

I'm always amazed how people like author "learn" and "build' so quickly. I recently started to dabble with unity on basics and no way on earth I can build, say something like Heartstone clone or the interaction. My background is web back end mostly. Good stuff OP.

Unity is deceptive in that it is easy to scratch the surface, but gets more complex than it needs to be for simple game features quite quickly. Unity has an immense depth and breadth to its feature set, it is frankly, too much game engine to fuss with if you just want to try making games. In my opinion. There are just so many new, engine specific concepts at play that you are not learning games, you are learning Unity.

If you are a programmer and want to dable then a code first framework like LÖVE might be less cognitive load. If you prefer a more featured framework then Godot is also a really great lightweight engine, but you will spend more time in the GUI than in the code.

Don't sell yourself short either, you have an advantage by knowing some backend concepts! A lot of people start from zero programming experience and jump into games.

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#75

Post by protocolture »

ehnto wrote: post #74
mattfrommars wrote: post #42

I'm always amazed how people like author "learn" and "build' so quickly. I recently started to dabble with unity on basics and no way on earth I can build, say something like Heartstone clone or the interaction. My background is web back end mostly. Good stuff OP.

Unity is deceptive in that it is easy to scratch the surface, but gets more complex than it needs to be for simple game features quite quickly. Unity has an immense depth and breadth to its feature set, it is frankly, too much game engine to fuss with if you just want to try making games. In my opinion. There are just so many new, engine specific concepts at play that you are not learning games, you are learning Unit…

Yeah my experience with Unity was that, if you are doing something the Unity way, its very easy. If you want to do something that the Unity devs never considered, you are at best developing from scratch, at worst existing Unity systems are going to stand in your way.

I built a prototype Metal Fatigue tech demo (No real game logic as such, just the framework) and I found that heightmap based deforming terrain for the underground drill rig to dig through was so outside the design intent of unity that it would be the sole thing I spent hundreds of hours working on to get it past the tech demo stage. Like I got it working, but its so tenuous I could never ship it as is. Not to mention the default modules were writing my changes back to the heightmap object, saving them when that was unintended. I think the code I was using was intended for tooling, not for game logic.

And the Unity Store is great if you need a plugin to clone some mobile game system, but once you went to any depth it was just a hook to get 50 bucks out of you for no gain.

Its an interesting ecosystem.

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#76

Post by cableshaft »

aspenmayer wrote: post #71
cableshaft wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also planning to release it on Steam, and it will be an upfront cost there. Also after paying the 'remove ads' price, which will likely be cheaper than the price I'm planning to sell it for on Steam (thinking $2.99 for mobile right now), the game will effectively become the same as the Steam version anyway. I agree that it sucks. I wish I could just put $2.99 as the price and it would still have a chance of selli…

Have you looked into distributing on Apple Arcade? I haven’t myself but it seems like it might be another potential source of income that doesn’t rely on ads/in-app purchases. I think Google Play has a similar game service?

From what I've heard, Apple Arcade won't even consider you for Apple Arcade unless you're already established and have made popular games in the past, and they're very selective even then. So there's probably no chance my game would be accepted for it.

This is one comment that corroborates that:

"It requires support for Mac OS and TV OS and committing to significant content updates every year for three years, at minimum. Revenue is based on how many people play your game compared to everything else on the platform.

Because of the contractual commitment and the need for marketing spend (If people don't play, you don't get paid), it's hard to recommend for a small developer without commercial experience, which is why Apple is rather particular about who they approve."[1]

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/dwwi87/experience_...

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#77

Post by cableshaft »

japhib wrote: post #70
KeplerBoy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you need an Ad framework and achievements? Isn't balatro a prime example of a game simply being a paid app? No ads, no bullshit. Just a game and a pricetag.

My 2c having released both premium and free apps on iOS and Android: premium apps do not sell. People don’t want to fork over any amount of money just to try an app that they may or may not enjoy. You can still make _some_ money, and get some downloads, that way, but it’s just completely incomparable to making it free. Some rough numbers from my recollection: I released Card Crusade (deck building mobile game) for $4…

Yeah, I'm planning to release the game on both Steam and iOS. With Love2D, I'm able to use mostly the same codebase outside of native iOS or Steam features I'd like to add.

Thanks for helping to confirm my suspicions. I used to release mobile games myself but it's been well over a decade. The landscape was a lot different back then.

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#78

Post by cableshaft »

furyofantares wrote: post #68
cableshaft wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've found anything online that has helped you get that working, if you remember and don't mind sharing I'd appreciate it.

I wrote a gist for you https://gist.github.com/kellydornhaus/45b8571807ec3ca659ea50...

This looks excellent. Thank you for taking the time to do this. Have you released anything with Love2d yet? I'd love to support it.

Re: Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE

#79

Post by furyofantares »

cableshaft wrote: post #78
furyofantares wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a gist for you https://gist.github.com/kellydornhaus/45b8571807ec3ca659ea50...

This looks excellent. Thank you for taking the time to do this. Have you released anything with Love2d yet? I'd love to support it.

No problem!

I made https://love-15.com which works on the web and as of today is on the iOS app store. I'll probably get it on Steam after that. I prefer playing the native builds personally.

It's fully free and about the smallest game design I could think of - I did it partly from a longstanding desire to make this specific game (I played a very similar thing decades ago on Palm Pilot) and partly as an experiment about just how much work can you get an LLM to do.

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