New Game! DOGS GOT YER TAIL
Hiya folks!
Been a long time since I started setting up this site, but I finally have a good reason to return, I have a new game out! DOGS GOT YER TAIL, a multiplayer dog-fight computer-mouse-brawler.
DGYT started it as my final for my Interactive Media class and kept iterating on it. I've been wanting to make a mouse based game for a while, I think interacting with a game world with something that people are very attuned to is interesting, especially when it's in a way that nobody really would ever have another use for. I took a lot of inspiration from Tap Out Saga and GIRP, I really wanted to make a game that eschews how you would normally approach a game with keyboard and mouse controls.
This is the first time I've used the Love2d framework, and boy, it's messy! The original game was coded in a 400-line main.lua file and I just kinda adapted that into a format that makes sense. (using a few libraries where its convient and splitting things into seperate files, mostly) But, like, instead of using classes each dog essentially has duplicated code from the other, I use a lot of global variables, that type of thing.
I originally started protoyping the game in HaxeFlixel, probably around 2022.
Picture I took of the original movement demo on my old laptop.
I didnt really get far beyond a square following the mouse, but you get the idea. I finally got it in a playable state in november, and I tested it on my boyfriend that month. I came to terms with the fact that the gameplay was lacking; It was fun to try and rip the mouse away from the other person, but it didn't quite play how I wanted it to. I decided to change the scoring method from biting the other dog's tail, to trying to play keep away with another object. This differientiates it into two distinct gameplay "modes" depending on if you have the flag and/or control of the mouse.
Intended emotional response to DOGS GOT YER TAIL.
Let's stop beating around the bush, this was my first project using LÖVE, and my first real project using Lua period. I'm not really sure I would call myself proficient in any language, I was ok at C for a while, I used a little bit of Javascript in high school, but that's pretty much it. Using lua has been great! I really love the simplicity and I would say I'm able to punch out code fairly quickly, even with being new to the language. Coming from HaxeFlixel, it was a little shocking realizing just how barebones love2d is. It lets you display sprites, play sounds, etc, but there's not much beyond that built in. There's no AABB (simple min-max XY) collision, no animation system, etc (Besides Box2d, but a lot developers use a library to access it anyways). Honestly, it doesn't bother me much. It's kinda fun figuring some of the stuff out. It's also kinda inspiring. I was thinking about how I would make games quicker and my first thought was a visual State Machine environment for linking functions to control behaviors and game states. (Sidenote: I abused a state machine plugin for unity to make Sunday Drive, it's kinda shocking how much you can do with 'em) Which would not only be easy to incorperate with a library, but I could probably make the visual interface fast with LÖVE.
DOGS GOT YER TAIL was made with LÖVE and developed using Aseprite and VS Code. I used Dracula Refined and OxProto. Which I'm putting here so I don't forget. 