Having worked on mostly boring school work and a slightly more interesting, yet hardly exhilarating, application for the Ubuntu Manual Project, for the past three days I have amused myself by instead working on something that I always löve doing; game creation with Lua and the Löve framework!

A number of months ago, I posted the first game I had ever made using Löve: Söccer. Since then I haven’t really gotten around to playing with it a lot. I have started working on some smaller projects just for fun, but I never got around to finishing them. However, now I have finally finished (well, kinda. At least it’s in a playable state) one of them! This one I call Oh Snap, Aliens!

Because I’m lazy like that, I’m just going to quote myself instead of coming up with a new, clever way of describing the game.

Oh Snap, Aliens! is a space shooter with the highly unique and revolutionizing goal of defending earth from a seemingly unstoppable and never-ending onslaught of alien attackers.

Unlike other games in the genre, Oh Snap, Aliens! doesn’t give you unlimited ammunition. Instead, you have to conserve your missiles so that you don’t run out right when there’s a ufo in your sights. In return for this inconvenience, the ship has the ability to aim its weapons 180 degrees

Currently the game isn’t very impressive in content. There’s only one enemy type, only one type of debris floating around being annoying, and there are no powerups (unless you count the ammo crates). What it does have is a ranking system, fancy particle effects, uh… Pretty neat graphics?

I’m probably not going to spend a whole heck of a lot of time on this in the nearest future, as the intent was to simply get my mind off the more boring work I have to do, and perhaps spark my creativity again, but eventually I hope to get back to it and add more content. Game making is always a hell of a lot of fun (even if it is crazy hard sometimes), and I find it both satisfying and relaxing; sadly, the same can’t be said for all other kinds of programming related tasks.

Because it is made with Löve, the game can be played on Windows, Linux and possibly even Mac OS X. I haven’t bothered to create any bundled binaries, since the game is currently just a 0.2 release, so if you want to try it, you first have to install Löve 0.6.2 or another compatible version (I believe the one in the Ubuntu repositories is version 0.5.0, which is not compatible).

Version 0.2 of Oh Snap, Aliens! can be downloaded in a pre-packaged .love-file from Github.

If you want the latest development version, that can also be obtained from Github.

For instructions on how to run Löve games, direct yourselves to the Lövely wiki.

Assorted links:

1. Löve forum thread
2. Löve wiki page
3. Github project page