Can someone tell me the latest best practices?

[Raskol]

hey everyone

As the topic said, I'm interested in the best ways to do specific parts of gamemaking because it was a while when I last tried to fool around with löve. Don't worry, I'm not looking for answers for my own problems at the moment, I just want to know the most common approach here.
Of course I read the wiki as well but I figured that you guys might have some more up to date tricks. Please bear in mind that I'm not THAT code-savvy but I can handle some intermediate things.

-Animation: I remember using anim8(or Anal, can't remember) for sprite animation but I guess there are other libraries by now. Can someone list some pros/cons/personal experiences?

-Camera handling?

-Creating maps and importing them: Last time I used tiled for this, what would you consider the best map importer library and why? how should one handle parallax effects?

Is there something for easing effects? I mean something like the jquery ui plugin.

This is a bit confusing: If your game has many units/actors/etc, do you add them by hand in the code or does one use some kind of editor? I understand many game developers build their own editors but is there some generic one by any chance?

What do you use for game state management?

So in short, I want to catch up and get some pointers to the right direction. Thank you in advance. Cheers!

[CaptainMaelstrom]

It depends on the scope of your game really. For instance, for very simple games, I would argue that you shouldn't even use libraries.

That being said, I typically use these libraries in all of my medium+ size projects: middleclass, stateful, flux, gamera, and a table serialization library. I forget which I'm using at the moment for serialization.

I have a global game variable which I assign a Game instance to. Then I add states and start it in it's "title screen" or "loading" state. I also have most classes in their own file and require the files at the beginning of my main.lua

My advice is to keep it as simple as you can.

[Jasoco]

I wrote my own state manager which I just call stateStack. It's not library-ready though as it is pretty well integrated into my own projects but it does the job. It's not actually difficult to make if you are advanced enough. But there are plenty of already made ones available on this forum.

For Easing I recommend Flux for actually handling it completely or easing.lua for getting the values yourself. Flux is pretty amazing. There's also Tween which is similar. So either one is recommended. They're basically the equivalent to jquery. I use Flux all the time. Makes doing neat animations and transitions simple as pie. Related: Cron for doing timers is also a big plus.

For Cameras I write my own just like I write my own tile management systems instead of using Gamera and Tiled. It's just me.

This is related to your importing maps question too. I am currently writing my own proprietary map editor to create and edit my own proprietary map format. But a lot of people will recommend Tiled, and I do too if you want to do it simply and not have to deal with the harder parts so you can get down to making your game itself and not the tools it needs.

[Raskol]

Cool, thanks guys, I'm going to looki into these