Making a Game

If you are new to programming, I suggest looking into the LOVE2D framework. All your code can be written in Lua, which is very easy to learn. The framework is open source, runs on LuaJIT and is cross-compatable with Windows, Mac, Linux, and mobile. It is possible to run in a browser, but with a little finesse. Anyways, go check it out and see what you think.

 

Arw I've worked with Lua for a couple months a few years ago... I recall it being quite easy to learn, despite it has a few odd unexpected features. Here's a part of the development notes I wrote for that project, though I'm not sure they're up-to-date (last time I edited them it was 6 Dec 2012):

Spoiler: Extract from my development notes

USEFUL NOTES ABOUT LUA

Lua is very powerful and, despite it lacks some costructs, you soon realize that you don't really need those constructs.

For instance, let's say that you want to write some code that in C++ would be:
> foo = (condition) ? (expression_if_true) : (expression_if_false);
Well, in Lua you just write:
> foo = (condition) and (expression_if_true) or (expression_if_false)
It works because of lazy evaluation of logical operators even when expression_* is not boolean
After you understand how to use it, it will prove waaaay more powerful than the ternary operator ?:

Similarly, 95% times you use a switch-case, you don't really need it if you have tables:
> http://lua-users.org/wiki/SwitchStatement

But it's not all roses and flowers: Lua has two big misfeatures and you MUST know them if you're going to write Lua code.

1) The default scope is global. GHHAAAAAAAGGGHHH! Why on Earth??

2) Arrays start from 1, not from 0. Well, this makes slightly more sense (in comparison).

Behind (2) there is a historical reason, being Lua descended from Sol (Simple Object Language).
But I still fail to find a reason behind (1). Anyway, in order to declare a local variable, you just have to put the keyword "local" before. If you're afraid that you could have wrongly declared a global variable by mistake (it's easy to forget to write the "local" keyward sometimes), you can just call in a shell:
> luac -o /dev/null -l na62_dissector.lua | grep SETGLOBAL
It should output nothing. If it prints something like this:
> 75 [42] SETGLOBAL 1 -30 ; wrong_global
It means that you declared a variable called wrong_global in line 42.
Actually, that command is also useful to pre-compile the script without running it in wireshark, in order to find the most obvious errors.

 

Regarding globals, you can use setfenv. I honestly don't use it often though... As long as your always thinking in terms of scope, it's not difficult to create an entire game without any globals. You can create a local table in one file and assign it to a local variable in another with require(). For example:

potatoFile.lua

Code:

local potatoTable = {
    remaining = 100 --percent
}

function potatoTable:eat()
    self.remaining = self.remaining - 10
end

return potatoTable

main.lua

Code:

local potato = require 'potatoFile'

print(potato.remaining) -- 100
potato:eat()
print(potato.remaining) -- 90