Can I make some games like... using Gideros?

Ggaews

Hi im new to here and new to programming as well.
I come here to make my own games and I somewhat hope to develop some famous games in the future

I have some questions about this engine. These questions might sound like silly because I really dont know about game developing much but please understand me, thx.

So my questiones are these,
1) Can I make games similar as Hotline-Miami, Nuclear throne which are gamemaker based games using Gideros studio?

2) I've heard that Gideros is much more focued on Mobile project. But I wanna use it for desktop export. Is it still fuctioning to execute games into Window or Mac etc?

3) Do I have to learn c++ just to make games like hotline miami or can knowing just Lua cover everything?

Thx a lot and ignore some grammar mistakes caz Im south korean.. X)

totebo

Hi @ggaews, welcome!

Gideros is ideal for a game like Hotline Miami. You can use Tiled for the levels and Gideros built-in very efficient TileMap, which can handle an amazing amount of tiles.

You'll be able to publish your game on mobile and desktop easily with the new and magic automated exports.

Lua is more than enough to create any 2D game. It's likely to save you time, because it's so abstracted.

Have fun!

Ggaews

@totebo
Thx a lot.
May I ask you a question only one more?
You said Lua is fit to make any 2d games. But actually I have heard that Lua is somewhat slow. Is it really true that games made with this engine + Lua have many lags if they have so many instances? Because making hotline miami-similar games requires many-many resources.

keszegh

@Ggaews,
it is possible to publish on desktop too, see e.g. http://store.steampowered.com/app/656970/MagiCat/ made with Gideros.

Perhaps a C API might be little faster but such a 2d game should not be that resource heavy and Gideros (and lua) are fast enough by my experience. that's especially true compared to gamemaker, games made by which tend to be slow according to reviews (or at least in the past).

The only drawback of Gideros is that for other engines you might find more shoot-em up templates. But TileMap is probably one of the most important components for such a game, also see maybe the example here http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/2318 .

one thing to note that to publish to Mac as of now Gideros uses QT and it's not clear if you can publish such an app without a QT licence. for windows though (were most players are) you can use win32 export which does not use QT.

overall, you are safe with Gideros and you will most probably enjoy it much more than programming in C.

totebo

@ggaews, in the case of Gideros I haven't been hampered by Lua as a language. If you stick to good practices, like you would in any language, it's remarkably fast. These tricks will make your game fly:

- Pooling; re-using frequently created and destroyed objects
- Localising variables (this is Lua specific)
- Using callbacks rather than events
- Caching fonts
- Using particles (no problem with hundreds or thousands of those on screen at once)

Gideros also has a fair few libraries that are native and super fast, like Box2D, Bump, JSON, Random, TileMap and more.

In short, Lua is very unlikely to be a bottleneck.

snooks

Here's a game that was recently released on Steam by a Gideros user...

http://store.steampowered.com/app/656970/MagiCat/

I am a new user too and in my research I was reading of people switching over to Gideros from other Lua engines because Gideros performed so much better. So Gideros's C/C++ engine and Lua interface is performant and the Lua that Gideros uses has also been enhanced with performance in mind.

There is the possibility writing C/C++ to use in your code if you like too... it's 100% open.

SinisterSoft

@snooks as well as the language enhancements I think that @Atlim also originally changed how some of the memory management worked in Lua to make it faster. I don't know if that is still the case though.