Love Handheld Game Maker

[DumpOnIt]

Hey all! I've been working on some silly new projects, and today I'm showing you a game maker program I designed for the dingoo! Right now it can create entities, have them interact with each other, take input and edit the entity graphics, but before adding anything more I want to reconsider how it's being done internally. Here are some quick screenshots first:

Vi1SXNv.png (3.55 KiB) Viewed 332 times

uwrRaWn.png (1.78 KiB) Viewed 332 times

AxBy3YV.png (4.23 KiB) Viewed 332 times

8PIxun0.png (1.03 KiB) Viewed 332 times

I like the feel of it when I'm actually using it, but the way it's written is pretty wacky. I'm sure there are many programming concepts I have been missing out on when writing this, so if you have any tips, I'd really like to hear them! One of the things I'm concerned about is how to write it in such a way that saving would work, along with duplicating entities. I use many, many tables in ways that might not be that great!

The main reason I made this at all was to see if it could be fun to have a game maker on a device like the dingoo that might be as much fun as software like RPG Maker, Wario Ware: DIY, Petit Computer (or Powerpoint? ) Having a pocket game maker is the coolest thing, and I'm very interested in the different ideas these programs have about "What makes a game?"

Anyway, enjoy messing around with it! It is designed for nlove on the Dingoo, but it works in love 0.8.0 without modification (although it looks funny in some places). The buttons are in the same layout as on the Super Nintendo controller. In menus, press A for "Ok" and B for "Back". There is support for X and Y actions, but I don't want to use many buttons until I really need to. When in special menus such as the image editor or the R rename dialog, use the Start button to exit. In the image editor, press X/Y to cycle focus between panes.

The controls are mapped for the Dingoo by default, but you may switch it to PC mode by hitting the F1 key. The keys are mapped in the following layout:

Up, Down, Left, Right = E, D, S, F
B, A, Y, X = K, L, J, I
L, R, Select, Start = W, O, G, H

If you have any tips on how things should be designed internally, have suggestions about what the simplest commands that could be used to make an interesting game are, have an interesting game maker you enjoyed, or anything else cool, please leave a post!