How would I go about learning to make "UI heavy/based games?"

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pyn
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How would I go about learning to make "UI heavy/based games?"

Post by pyn »

I eventually want to make strategy, puzzle, and I guess what you would call "click heavy" games. I tried looking at other Love game's code, and it didn't really get me anywhere in terms of understanding why they did X, Y, and Z.

How would I go about learning this, and what would be a good place to start?

Thanks!
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raidho36
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Re: How would I go about learning to make "UI heavy/based games?"

Post by raidho36 »

They did X, Y and Z because they thought it will get the job done. If it's not gonna do the job for you - don't do it. Pretty simple!

Don't try designing ahead if you have no idea what you actually want. Stick with contemporary solutions, add up to it as you progress.
pyn
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Re: How would I go about learning to make "UI heavy/based games?"

Post by pyn »

raidho36 wrote: Thu Feb 23, 2017 7:32 am They did X, Y and Z because they thought it will get the job done. If it's not gonna do the job for you - don't do it. Pretty simple!
Oh sorry! I more of meant, "Where did they get the knowledge to know that they needed to do X, Y, and Z?" -- Like are there any tutorials or resources that teach basic UI creation, randomized map/puzzle generation, etc?
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s-ol
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Re: How would I go about learning to make "UI heavy/based games?"

Post by s-ol »

pyn wrote: Thu Feb 23, 2017 4:48 pm
raidho36 wrote: Thu Feb 23, 2017 7:32 am They did X, Y and Z because they thought it will get the job done. If it's not gonna do the job for you - don't do it. Pretty simple!
Oh sorry! I more of meant, "Where did they get the knowledge to know that they needed to do X, Y, and Z?" -- Like are there any tutorials or resources that teach basic UI creation, randomized map/puzzle generation, etc?
There are plenty of all of this, but few concrete to löve. Which is not a bad thing, because this is all rather abstract.

Especially for UI you will find that the web is filled to the brim with discussions about Web UI design/implementation using mostly HTML/CSS/JS, but the different paradigms employed hold for all technologies.

For example a couple of buzzwords that could help you grasp the topic:
- Model-View-Controller Frameworks
- Component-Based UI Frameworks (React, Elm)
- Immediate GUIs vs 'static' UIs

you don't want to necessarily pick paradigms like this and (re-)implement them in Lua or anywhere else, but it is good to see what others are doing, figure out what of that is relevant for you and coming up with the best fit possible.

Random generation is usually referred to as 'procedural generation'. Looking for that will yield tons of material (e.g. google: 'procedural dungeon generation'; btw the first hit is a post in löve, written by adonaac).

s-ol.nu /blog  -  p.s-ol.be /st8.lua  -  g.s-ol.be /gtglg /curcur

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print( type(love) )
if false then
  baby:hurt(me)
end
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Positive07
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Re: How would I go about learning to make "UI heavy/based games?"

Post by Positive07 »

Yeah also you should start with the basics, you need to render UI elements, learn how to do that, draw images to screen and text and so on.

You need a way to layout the UI, to make lists, frames and whatnot, figure that out, how are you gonna create your objects and so on

Then you need to be able to click them so get the mouse coordinates and callbacks and try to detect when the click happened in the button and when not (that is simple AABB-point-rectangle collision detection)

Then you may have components in your world, but your world moves around as the player walks, so you probably need something like a camera, and a way to get from world-camera coordinates to screen coordinates.

...

You start small and keep on growing. There are libraries to do UI, there are libraries for collisions detections, there are libraries for cameras. If you wanted you could of course use them, but I recommend that you start small first and when complexity grows then move on to libraries. (Create simple buttons with code but when you need a component like a text input go with a library, for example)
for i, person in ipairs(everybody) do
[tab]if not person.obey then person:setObey(true) end
end
love.system.openURL(github.com/pablomayobre)
pyn
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Re: How would I go about learning to make "UI heavy/based games?"

Post by pyn »

Thanks for the helpful replies! I felt like I was hitting a wall trying to learn this lol

I really appreciate it!
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