LuaPlayer Homebrew Development

Examples

Below are common game development examples I wrote to help jump start anyone interested in making PSP games:

1. PSP Controls 1 - prints button pressed on the PSP.
2. PSP Controls 2 - prints button pressed on the PSP dynamically.
3. Moving Sprite - control a sprite on the screen with the d-pad.
4. Player Follower - a simple game that shows drawing two spites. One sprite is controlled by the player, the second sprite follows the player with a simple easeInEaseOut algo.
5. Player Collision - crude way to detect sprite collision.
6. Tile Map Engine - a very basic tile map engine importing from .csv
7. Orbiting NPC - a basic node orbiting another node example
8. Water Sim - simulating water via a sin wave
9. Perlin Noise Generator - map generating via perlin noise. Also, includes a port of 2D Perlin Noise to Lua.

Development flow

Since LuaPlayer Euphoria v7 isn't setup for destop development I recommend downloading PPSSPP and running your project through emulation. PPSSPP is cross platform and even works on Android and iOS phones.

Download: https://www.ppsspp.org/download/

Some of the primitive drawing functions (screen:print, screen:drawLine, image:pixel, etc) don't work on PPSSPP without a few graphics setting changes, here's a working setup in PPSSPP settings:

Graphics:
	backend = OpenGL
	Software render (slow,accurate) = on
	VSync = on
	Frame Skipping = off
	Auto frameskip = off
	Alternative speed = Unlimited
	Alternative speed 2 = off
	Spline/Bezier curves quality = High
	Buffer graphics command = Up to 2

Other projects to checkout

• The Labyrinth - A minimalistic raycasting engine technical demonstration

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Thought log

04/02/2023

It seems that the current version (1.14.3-28) of PPSSPP doesn't handle LuaPlayer drawing correctly. I thought that screen:print, screen:drawLine, and image:pixel were broken in Euphoria V7 until I ran my scripts on an actual device. I'll have to research a better emulator for PSP testing because I have some ideas that require the more primitive functions. Plus, debugging with screen:print is so much easier than importing the entire Font like Euphoria recommends.

UPDATE: see Development flow above on how I fixed this.

03/31/2023:

I went two days writing Lua without the language installed on my Mac. brew install lua but then I soon learned that Lua has it's own package manager via brew install luarocks. For some reason Lua seems like such an old language since it was one of the first I learned as a teenager. luarocks makes me happy, good to know there's folks out there push Lua as a modern language.