General Lua and game coding advice?

Started by MysticLord, October 13, 2021, 06:12:00 PM

Previous topic - Next topic
I went to a community college for 3 years where I took almost all the CS and CS-adjacent classes, and I work in freelance web/mobile development. I have a bit of romhacking background, but I've never made any games.

Do you have any advice for me to get up to speed with Lua, or game programming in general?

My goal is to build something with elements of Secret of Evermore, ALTTP, Romancing SaGa 3, and Final Fantasy 6. Field navigation/interaction and mob-dodging like the former two, and JRPG-style battles like the latter two. I originally wanted to make a FF6 ripoff, but there's nothing to do outside of battle so it puts me to sleep.

I found Solarus to be pretty easy to use. The engine handles basic stuff like movement and sprite rendering, so replicating ALTTP will be the easy part.

As for a battle system, I've experimented with making one. Its relatively easy stuff. I recommend reading the API docs though: https://solarus-games.org/doc/latest/index.html

There are also resource packs with built in scripts for dialog and such on the main site: https://solarus-games.org/en/development/resource-packs

Good luck with your Romancing Final Secret to the Past of Evermore Legend project.

You're probably in a good place if you've done a few years of CS classes, you'll be able to understand the logic of how things work. Lua is pretty straightforward. If you're familiar with Javascript or Python, it's pretty much the same with different syntax.

I'd recommend going through Christopho's tutorials and following along, they're kind of the required reading for Solarus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq7rda5G6Lc&list=PLzJ4jb-Y0ufwkbfy49F_NrLtxCAiGJw5r&ab_channel=ChristophoGames

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8StwujI-Hbg&list=PLzJ4jb-Y0ufxwkj7IlfURcvCxaDCSecJY&ab_channel=ChristophoGames

There's two playlists. The 1.5 one is older, but I don't really think much of it has become outdated, so if there's something that isn't covered in the 1.6 playlists, the 1.5 ones should probably be fine.