Codename-LT

Get it on : Love | OSX | Windows | Ubuntu | Android

A pixelart game where you have to run without getting caught by evil agents. This is the product of development with an awesome team of people from the VACAROXA. Find them on twitter looking the Hashtag or follow @estudiovacaroxa.

Firstly the people involved in the whole project:

@bakudas | @pcbmani | @_Gabrielfer | @MauricioMunky | @DidiGameBoy | @derekpxart | @eri0o | @rafaelgiordanno

Game Controls

Use WASD or Arrow keys to move. Use K or space as accept button.

F11 or Alt+Enter gives fullscreen, - and + rescale the game window.

Xbox360 USB controls are also supported. Other controls were not tested. Android and iOS has experimental touch controls.

Running

The game is made with Love2d, so after you git clone this repository or download the .zip, you can run by going in it's parent folder and running

love project/

Alternatively, if you just want to play, look into releases or go to the game itch.io page and download the latest binary.

Note running with the love command requires installing love2d

Game Code

Love2d and Lua

Lua is a scripting language that is really good at being plugged in existing C++ code and exposing it like an API, to offer script functionality: imagine you built something like Autocad and forgot to build a console to offer advanced functionality, Lua is really good for that. I understand that Lua doesn't aim to enable pure feature complete Lua development.

Love2d is a framework for game development. Love2d is not built in Lua, it's built in C++ with SDL and exposes an API with an attached Lua interpreter. Porting your game to a platform, means essentially porting Love2d to that platform.

The libraries

We can't invent the wheel that many times, so besides using Love2d and Lua, libraries were used to ease development.

hump

hump was used to provide gamestates which were used for providing the title screen, the credits, the game and the cutscene.

It's important to notice that each state has no information on the other (unless using globals), so for example, to switch state, you have to ask the main.lua, a function was built to deal with this.

hump also provided Timers, which was used to prevent an input in dialog boxes from skipping additional dialogs. Other tools from hump were not used. The Camera is also provided by hump and we attached it to the player sprite.

Proxies

One liners were provided to ease Music and Image loading from correponding assets folder. They are in main.lua, and allow stuff like Music.music_name:play() to happen.

STI

A library for loading Tiled maps that are exported as .lua files. Tiled also provides a box2d implementation for physics. The box2d implementation from the latest library was broken or incompatible with latest Tiled, so a modded one was made on the fly to work, and was how the collision with walls and characters was made in game.

terebi

All the art is pixel art, this library guarantees everything will be draw pixel perfect and also gives us nice features like rescalling. So the game provides f11 for full screen and + and - for rescalling the main window.

anim8

This library was used to animate the player sprite, the agents sprite and other sprites.

Other libraries

During development, other libraries were added, notably lume.lerp for easing the dialog appearance in game.

The engine

The images, music and sounds can be just placed in the game folder and directly be used in game, skipping any import/export workflow. Tiled was used as a level editor.

main.lua

The main code deals with initializing everything (terebi, game states, load assets, and push shaders), creates a function to provide access to game states, set the initial state to the StartScreen and unifies the keyboard and joystick input in a single interface that can be pooled.

Game.lua

The actual game. The init function starts the game and sets the level to 1. Once each level is loaded, the map is loaded through sti and objects in the map are replaced by entities: the Player receives the player entity, , the itemSpawner are removed and the entities are inserted too. All entities created are inserted in a table called sprite_list, a new layer is created in the game map, it's draw function is replaced by one to draw the entities and this layer is then inserted before the foreground layer, allowing for everything to be drawn by a single map:draw().

The update function deals with all the game logic: makes the player be followed by agents, checks for collision between the player and the items and the exit point.

other files (*.lua)

The cutscene, credits and start screen are really concise and can be easily understood by code. A Character entity and Item entity were created to deal with those objects: postion, size, animation and direction.

Using Tiled

Tiled is the map editor used for this game. It can be downloaded here. Tiled 1.1.1 was used which was the latest stable when Codename_LT was made, but should be good with the latest stable available.

After downloading the code, look inside the folder project/map. There are five .tmx files, level0.tmx to level4.tmx, the game levels. More levels can be added by editing Game.lua in project/src/states.

With Tiled opened, look into layers. If a layer has the custom property with key collidable with a value that is a string, written true, that layer is considered a collidable, and anything drawn there will be collidable, even if it's invisible. Use the ERASER to erase the tiles instead of painting with transparent tiles. Right now, there is only a single collidable layer, and it's called tileLayerWalls.

We placed objects in two layers, one is called objDecoracao, to store decoratives, and other is called objLayer. The engine doesn't care for the layers, it will search all the map looking for objects that have special things in them:

• An object named Player, it will be the player entry point in the map.

• An object named Exit, it will be the exit point of the map, to advance to next Level.

• An object named itemSpawner, with the custom property item. Acceptable values for item right now are either radio or secret (the suitcase).

• An object named ennemySpawner (with typo TM!) with a custom property id that takes a numeric value. This will be considered a spawn point for agents, it will be better explained later on.

• An object with the custom property type with string value trigger. This is a trigger object. I will explain below how they work.

trigger objects!

A trigger object contain a field called runLuaChain that takes a string text containing a valid Lua Chain for the engine.

A simple chain can be of the type:

Say('This is some text!'),
Say('Some more text!'),
closeSay(),
SpawnEnemy(3)

Much attention to the proper comma on all lines except the last. SpawnEnemy(number) spawns enemys in the spawn points of the same id as the number passed. After a Say('text'), a closeSay() is needed to close the text dialog.

Supported actions right now:

SpawnEnemy( number_id )
Say( string_text )
timedSay( seconds_number , string_text )
closeSay(  )
playSound( string_soundName )
EndGame(  )

If your trigger object runs a Lua Chain ( you can just add a closeSay() if it needs to be empty), you can also add a custom property runLuaScript and run pure lua functions. They aren't chained so they will happen instantly.

Trigger objects are destroyed when the player activates them!

License and Copyright

The font used is Verdana2 by Paul Spades.

This code is MIT License and the music and image graphics are available through CC BY 4.0

@bakudas | @pcbmani | @_Gabrielfer | @MauricioMunky | @DidiGameBoy | @derekpxart | @eri0o | @rafaelgiordanno