Three years ago, I became familiar with Lua for an interview test task. Before that, I had no experience with it. So, my first surprise was how easy it was to learn and start using it. Yes, complained a little about the “continue” statement, but it was easy to get used to.
The next time I got to Lua it was when we started to work on CodeCombat Worlds – Educational Game on the Roblox platform to teach kids programming. So yes, we used Luau. Luau is an extension of Lua with some improvements, such as type-checking and other features. I already have experience with interpreting languages, so getting used to Luau for game development was easy. When I started to use it, I was a little skeptical that we could use it for our ambitious project. I was wrong, and I was happy to be wrong. Lua is an excellent language for game development and scripting. I like its simplicity and straightforwardness.
When I recently decided what game engine to play with, I found that Defold is using Lua. It’s an excellent choice for this game engine as it highlights its simplicity. I’m not sure I would use Defold for big projects; however, it’s an excellent choice for small projects, especially educational games, because it is easy to make HTML5 games with it (Hello Chromebooks in schools!).
If you are interested in more technical details, I would recommend the article “Lua is so underrated” by Noë Flatreaud, which inspires me to write this post.
#GameDev #Lua #Defold #Roblox #CodeCombat #EducationalGames #HTML5Games #Chromebooks