Introduction

In this post I want to share what it was like to work on Lucky Strike, things I could have done better and things I’m very happy with.

At first I was hesitant to participate in this jam for blind gamers. Sure, I’m blind myself and have made some games in the past, but having a full time job as a software developer made me think I wouldn’t have time or that I’d be coding all day at work to code even more in my free time. However, I decided to give it a go, especially because I saw that many people were participating, even sighted developers. I wanted to give people a game to play which would be simple to make but also a bit unpredictible (rng always wins in this game) and also that it would have enough of a story to give the players a sense of immersion, even if minimal.

So I started looking for a new game engine. I had coded a couple of games using Node in the past, with mixed results. Node is a great choice, for the web. But games are another matter… I always use a lot of audio and voices in my games and I need instant access to these files from the user’s drive, I don’t need it waiting for the download to be processed so the file can play. So my only option at first was Node + Electron, not really a viable choice in most gaming situations: Take the audio, + the size of Electron which is about 100 to 200 megabytes, and the high memory usage, my game wouldn’t run on most platforms.

So I started looking for alternatives: thanks to my friends from a telegram group (you know who you are if you read this) I found out about Love2D, a Lua game engine which was supposedly very lightweight and easy to use.

I had already coded another project in Lua before, so I talready knew the language quite a bit. so I dove in, grabbed some components off the internet and friends and started coding.

at first I had quite a simple game going on, with crappy robot voices and a gun which would explode, and at one point I really thought this was it. I wouldn’t have time or the motivation to go further, to add more content to the game. I was going to lose my first jam by a wide margin because the game was crap, it wasn’t even a real game. But then…

I found the motivation to continue development. I thought, let’s add footsteps to the robot. My friend Talon said that the player could move gradually instead of tapping the arrow keys, and I got some more suggestions here and there. I thought, this robot is boring. I made some voices using a plugin called Vocal synth from Izotope (which was also Talon’s recomendation by the way), which I bought specifically to make this game but I am now using to create funny audio clips as christmas greetings. I was lucky to have purchased many sound libraries in the past, which helped me a lot during the development.

I also used an app called Samplism by Audio Helper Project, which is available for Mac and helps a lot when browsing through a bunch of sound files.

In conclusion, what I take from this project are some new VST plugins, a new game engine to work with, and motivation to make even more games. Not bad, not bad at all.