The next gift will be sent to somebody who creates something interesting in our Lua prototyping engine, DaisyMoon. We haven’t decided on the hows, whens and whys yet, so the challenge hasn’t officially started yet. We’re waiting until the documentation is more complete and we have a Mac build working again (progress has been made).

Anthony Salter of Viridian Games has planned to do a small video blog series about DaisyMoon. Something to keep an eye on!

/jeb

We’ve made a new game prototype called “Horror Tactics”. It’s a “move’em’up” kind of game inspired by Games Workshop’s old Space Hulk board game.

The game has been scripted in our DaisyMoon Lua engine, so you can view and edit the source code if you want to change settings or difficulty. The music has been made by Blackspawn.

Please give the prototype a go and give us feedback on what you think about it!

Windows: http://www.oxeyegames.com/files/HT/HorrorTactics.zip

You may also discuss this in our forums.

Cheers!

/jeb

local stuff = lib.getStuff()
stuff:foobar() — call C++ member method

However, it doesn’t allow you to do this:

local stuff = lib.getStuff()
stuff.onEvent = function(self) print(”Recieved event!”) end

The problem is that with Lunar all objects of the “stuff” class share the same meta table. It’s possible to modify the meta table in Lua by calling getmetatable(), but then you will be modifying the meta table of all instances of “stuff…”

In other words I needed a new solution. A friend over at #gamedev (at QuakeNet), Joris “Interface” de Gruyter, gave me a link to a Lua in C++ article at CodeProject. That was great, it had all kinds of useful stuff, but it required the script to be run for each object because it used a “this pointer” method, such as:

this:foobar() — call C++ member function
this.onEvent = function(self) end — create callback function

I can imagine this kind of system is great for certain kinds of projects, since it cleans up the Lua code and places different objects into different Lua files. However, this was still not what I wanted! So I scratched my head a while and looked around in the code of the two options… and then I realized they were combinable!

So the solution I used was to create a new Lunar-like class (called “Lunamatic,” after a famous Akarra/Harvest player), since it had that nice member-function pointer stuff, but instead of placing the meta table information in the global scope I recreated the table for every instance of the class. As you can imagine, this is less efficient than using a shared table, so it’s not useful in every situation, but sometimes. This way I could achieve what I was really looking for, namely:

local button1 = gui.createComponent(”button”)
local button2 = gui.createComponent(”button”)
button1:moveTo(100, 100)
button1.onClick = function(self) print(”foo”) end
button2.onClick = function(self) print(”bar”) end

Since our WordPress skin isn’t suitable for code dumps, I have put the juicy stuff in our forums. For the interested, pleace follow this link: http://www.oxeyegames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=346

/jeb

PS. The RTS article series will continue “in 2009″ DS.

Now it’s time for a new TIGSource competition and a new game! This time the theme is Bootleg Demakes, and people have posted over 100 threads about competition projects. A “bootleg” means “inofficial copy” and “demake” means “that is made to look as though it were running on older-generation hardware”. We could obviously not resist competing again and, using our Daisy Moon engine once more, created House Globe.

Hit the jump for the full story!

Artifact’s House Globe – 2D Real-time Strategy Game

Our competition entry is a demake of the classic Homeworld by Relic. If you haven’t played it, the short story is that Homeworld is a real-time strategy game in space. Your fleet is centered around your Mothership, which constructs units and is the drop-off zone for resources. In the game you are travelling through space in order to find your homeworld, while evil aliens attempt to destroy you (obviously).

When we began making the game we set our hardware target at the PC games of the mid-ninetees, think Dune 2 (i.e. the 320×240 resolution is intentional). We wanted to translate Homeworld’s 3D view to a flat 2D version, while keeping the key features that made Homeworld the game it is. That means your Mothership (called Maternal Vessel in House Globe) is the center piece of your fleet and will construct all units. It also means that we wanted to keep the tactical/strategical toggle that Homeworld has.

Beyond those initial concepts, we felt quite free to design our own game. We put much effort on making the “micro” part interesting (good control/response when moving units), and having a balanced technology tree. In the end we believe we managed to make a really good game in only 10 days or so.

Features:

• 2D RTS
• Single-player practice vs the computer
• 1on1 online multi-player
• Replay recordings of multi-player games

Screenshots:

Downloads:

• Mac OS X (Universal Binary, 16 MB)
• Windows (14 MB)

Check the readme for game controls (it’s fairly inituitive). If you play any multi-player games, please send us the replay files! And… have fun!

/ jeb

The patch contains the following mods:

• Emulate Normal Mode: A mod that works just like the Normal Mode.
• Emulate Rush Mode: A mod that works just like Rush Mode.
• Emulate Wave Mode: A mod that works just like Wave Mode.
• Starhawk: A mod that allows the player to send in a small fighter jet with custom graphics by entering “starhawk” in the input field that appears after pressing Enter ingame.
• Super Gun: A mod that allows the player to upgrade defense towers into bullet spewing super guns! These guns don’t require energy, but instead eat credits when they need to refill ammo.
• Infinite Credits: A mod that gives the player infinite credits.

Here’s the Mac OS X updater for registered users (2.6 MB). Open the dmg and run the patcher, then simply drag and drop the Harvest application on to the patcher’s window.

The Windows update is available here (1.3 MB). This patcher requires a previous installation of Harvest, simply use the same application folder when you run it.

Happy Modding!

You can either play yourself or cooperatively with a friend, but in both cases the objective is to get Fay and Corn to the top of the tower, where an evil boss awaits. The topic of the competition was that the game should be different every time you play, so the game’s level and boss are randomized when the game begins. Download the game here:

• Mac OS X: http://www.oxeye.se/files/stuff/BIFF_Mac.zip
• Windows: http://www.oxeye.se/files/stuff/BIFF.zip

Like the mods for Harvest, this game has been written completely in Lua. This has been an interesting experiment, and feels like an easy and quick way of testing new game ideas. You will probably see more of this from us

Hit the jump for a screenshot from the game…

The mod support has its own forum category, where you will be able to find documentation and other people’s mods. So far we’ve released a “beta patch” for those who wants to try the mods or make their own ones. You find the patch, and some basic example mods, here: http://www.oxeyegames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=246

/jeb