Some time ago I accepted the challenge to write a game in Lua and in Lua only. btw – a strange challenge, cause Lua is a conjoined twin-sister of C.
What started as a game engine for Windows bloated into a command prompt ASCII engine for DOS, writen mostly in Lua (it doesn’t live without some bytes of C code).
Here the second game I made with it. All the graphics rendered with ASCII-chars and the sound is provided via PC speaker.
Atomohod – a 2d-action/puzzle game about space exploration.
You’re flying away from Danger, threatening Earth, and the goal is to get as far as you can in the shortest time possible.
Your spaceship is operated in two parallel modes: the space mode and the reactor mode. You switch between these modes back and forth, produce energy for the flight, maneuver around obstacles, shot down threats, discover planets, and collect resources for a further journey.
The key features of Atomohod are puzzle management, indirect control of the spaceship, and the real-time gameplay in both modes.
A 3 min video about the game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WebAX7WpJAU
A game page to download DOS and Windows-ready versions (you need the latest 21.09.2023 update):
https://primitivethinking.itch.io/atomohod
Your feedback is really appreciated 🙂
For those, who would want to test it on real hardware: Lua 5.2 is not the fastest language, and the engine, starting as a Windows project, is rather abstractions-heavy. Thus you would need a Pentium-gen CPU and 32 mb of RAM for a comfort play.
I would recommend DOS-vm or DOSBOX on modern hardware.
.
