Some questions from a teacher planning to develop serious games

Betofantasioso · June 2014

Hi everyone,

I'm a teacher, and I want to start using Gideros for developing some games for my students. And I have a few questions about Gideros. I hope you can help me out.

I was wondering how easy is to work with text in Gideros. I mean displaying text on screen, move text around, wrap text, spin text, etc.

And finally, the games I want to develop need a big database of text. I used to use Gamesalad and its tables worked great for me. But I found it really slow and limited, that's why I got interested in Gideros. Does Gideros have tables, SQ lite compatibility or any efficient way to handle 2D list or a text matrix?

Thanks a lot for your help!

iWatts · June 2014

Exploring Text:
-- Text
local Message = TextField.new( font, "FontMessage")
Message:setPosition(50,50)
stage:addChild(Message)

-- Moving text
if (what happens) then
Message:setText("New Message")
end

seppsepp · June 2014

Hi.

Gideros is capable of SQLite: http://docs.giderosmobile.com/reference/plugin/sqlite3

Btw: How old are your student? Which grade? School or university or something?

Greetings

Sebastian

keszegh · June 2014

rotating and spinning is also as simple as moving, just a line of code.
for wrapping there is a class:
http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/1580/textwrap-addition/p1

Betofantasioso · June 2014

Thanks a lot for your asnwers.

I'm a linguist and language teacher and I want to develop language learning games. That's why Gideros text capabilities are really important to me. I also tried Stencyl, but it's not really optimized for working with texts and 2D list.

I'm starting diving into game development hence my first options were Game salad and Stencyl. I hope Gideros is not that hard to learn. It looks quite documented and with a lively and firendly community.

Cheers!

PaulH · June 2014

Gideros was my first exposure to the Lua language, and there are pitfalls involved using a language without strict data types or the need to declare variables, but there are advantages there too. Gideros lacks a debugger with breakpoints and data viewing, but other than that it's fantastic. The console works nicely for debugging, the Gideros Player launches code instantly, and the speed of the apps on Android and iOS is better than I would ever have expected. Manipulating text in Lua is quite simple and straightforward, and displaying text or any other element of the scene with animation, rotation, alpha, various fonts, scaling, etc., is quite easy in Gideros. I haven't used databases with it, but as noted above the capability is there.

Organizing the text in files would be another option, which I know Gideros handles nicely. My new app pulls and parses a lot of text from over 500 files. Both the file IO and parsing was easy to code and it runs plenty fast.

PaulH

Betofantasioso · June 2014

Thanks a lot to all of you. Your comments have been quite helpful. I think Gideros is the tool I'm looking for.

OZApps · June 2014

@Betofantasioso,
Have a read of @Ar2rsawseen's book on Gideros and my Book on Lua (link in my signature below) Tables and handling text (as you said) is native functionality of Lua which is auto-inherited by Gideros. Then the ease of use, testing with Gideros makes it a pleasure to work with.

This may be off track, but testing code with Gideros on the device is actually still faster than running Playgrounds with swift despite the absence of a debugger and breakpoints and watches. Workarounds are not very difficult to achieve.

HubertRonald · June 2014

Hi @Betofantasioso
If you want to teach as developing games
I recommend this link too
http://www.codeskulptor.org/

It has some demos and scripts are in Python
you only save and share your links
http://www.codeskulptor.org/#user34_PVSP0HFA48_0.py
(Touch Play Button)

You can see how your games work
I hope this serves you too

Betofantasioso · June 2014

Hi @OZApps I'm already using @Ar2saween book and about to start using yours.

I checked swift as well, but since you cannot export your projects to Android I think Gideros wins in that as well.

Thanks a lot!

Betofantasioso · June 2014

Hi @HubetRonald,

thanks for the recommendation. I'm actually an Spanish teacher looking for making games for learning Spanish. Your codeskultor is really neat though. I already recommend it to my linguist colleagues interested in Phyton.

Cheers!

seppsepp · June 2014

I really like Gideros! But if you want to make games with text to be central then you maybe should have a look at Twine:

http://twinery.org

Just a random example:

http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=d6julpweme8y49u
http://scoutshonour.com/cowgirl/

Greetings

Sebastian

john26 · June 2014

I would recommend using TTFont (true type fonts) rather than regular bitmap fonts as it allows you to set up multiple font sizes easily from a single .ttf file. And the text will look good on any device without needing to create different bitmap fonts for different resolutions. Eg;

font=TTFont.new("arial.ttf",10,true)     -- 10 point, true = antialiasing (recommended)
t=TextField.new(font,"Hello, world!")
stage:addChild(t)
t:setPosition(100,100)
t:setRotation(30)
t:setScale(2)

SinisterSoft · June 2014

Make sure you have the rights to distribute the TTF fonts though. Sometimes it's better to use bitmaps.

Betofantasioso · June 2014

Thanks a lot for all your comments. They have been really helpful in giving me an idea on what I can do with Gideros.

Can't wait to make my first game with it!

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