love VS TypeScriptToLua

I've built a few games with my son over the years. The fun part for us was all about fast iteration, and then laughing at the bugs together.

There are some other recommendations here for how to approach 3d, and he is specifically asking for 3d -- but I want to put in one more pitch for 2d: the fun-to-tedium ratio can be much higher.

I wonder if you could spend some time prototyping some of his ideas in LÖVE https://love2d.org/ -- if you show him the smallest sketch of something working, he might have an idea about what to add next.

Many years ago, on a flight, we went from 0 to game before we landed (with no experience).

* When a cell is born it randomly takes on the color of one of its (3) parents.

To try it out:

1. Install LÖVE for your device from https://love2d.org (~5MB and open source). (iOS requires building from source on a Mac, or installing the third-party Love2D Studio: https://love2d-studio.marknoteapp.com)

2. Install my Lua Carousel from https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel (~100KB). It includes all its source code and can be edited live on a computer as it runs.

3. Copy the ~100 lines of code from the bottom of https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog/651711/new-version-after-9-days and paste them into Lua Carousel.

Probably the most important piece of software we'll be playing around with is a game engine called LÖVE. Lua is well known around developer circles as being a good scripting language when it comes to making games, and this engine is one of the more popular. I'll be going through installation at the end of this post.

I got it – these are the steps I took:

1. Download Love from https://love2d.org/

libGDX is great, but I can understand if it's not for some people. This also applies to love2d, raylib and Monogame

You don't need to use git if you don't want to. Try downloading the 0.10.2 source directly here (the file you want is love-0.10.2-linux-src.tar.gz); I see you've tried this already but try again just to see what happens. Extract it to a directory (e.g. love-0.10.2-linux-src) and then run:

Love2d (MIT/C++/Lua) https://github.com/love2d/love

- Löve (doesn't have a separate page, but showcases a few games at the bottom of the page): https://love2d.org

The game, Wasp Escape, was built using the open-source Löve 2D game library for Lua.

love2d (lua) is a productive, fun, good docs, and most importantly proven / field-tested 2d game library, with easy to learn fast to compile and fast to run language - lua. while lua might not have a lot of features as python, the big bonus is that its much more focused language, which is important because otherwise you can get easily distracted on bells and whistles that other programming languages provide, i know that from experience

I've had some success with https://github.com/TypeScriptToLua/TypeScriptToLua

Luau may be an alternative as well, haven't tried it.

I love Lua, but at larger scales it's unmanageable.

There are some plugins (typescript.nvim) that use a Typescript to lua transpiler (TypescriptToLua]

54:28 reminded me of TypeScriptToLua, so if you wanted to, then you could turn this into Lua :^)

One immediate comparison that springs to my mind is the Löve 2D engine [1], which is a tiny game engine written entirely around Lua scripting (so that Lua includes the full game run loop as well).

Lua is a good scripting language, but it doesn't have the ubiquity of JS (and Löve doesn't have the ubiquitous deployment of the modern browser). Also, Lua doesn't have a static type ecosystem (though there are interesting projects like TypescriptToLua [2] exploring that space, but you can from the name they are following/lagging the JS ecosystem here).

There probably is a need to package more browser games as "real" games and a lightweight Canvas-focused approach could find a nice like Löve, especially if it were easier, for instance, to maybe port to consoles for small/indie game teams than one of the web views or Electron. (Though certainly Microsoft already has a version of WebView2 running on the Xbox.)

[1] https://love2d.org/

[2] https://github.com/TypeScriptToLua/TypeScriptToLua

Not part of the mods, but using https://github.com/TypeScriptToLua/TypeScriptToLua is quite easy and works surprisingly well. You can find some of the type definitions for computercraft here: https://github.com/Eforen/cc-tweaked-types/tree/master/declarations

It might be helpful to keep in mind: Typescript is a compiler that parses a Typescript AST and prints out whatever you want. So if your goal is to use it in a JS context, the only thing regulating what you do with it is that it outputs valid JS that can be interpreted by the various JS engines. There are projects like TypeScriptToLua which uses the TS compiler to print out Lua code.

You can take a look at TypescriptToLua which transforms the TS AST into Lua code using the compiler API, however I think you're barking up the wrong tree. The TS compiler works on *it's own\* AST generated from parsed Typescript. You can see how they implement your own type here. What you have some structured data and want to turn it into a type definition. That's just some loops you write yourself over data you've hopefully structured in a sane way. Turn it into a string, write it to a file with the extension `.d.ts`. No libraries needed.