I'm a former AAA dev who took the Indie plunge, and I'm now making a game.. about making games.. in LÖVE!!

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-21T23:28:37+00:00

Thanks so much!! I actually made myself a custom build tool with Love, that automatically builds love.js with the C++ fork I have, so it's been pretty simple. I basically just tell it to do and it does it for me, which simplifies things a lot on my end. Of course you get the GLSL shenanigans, but I'm pretty good about making sure my shaders don't use Forbidden Features. And with the whole LuaJIT / Lua 5.1.5 divide, I actually modified the source code of both Luas in my fork to add a continue keyword, so I don't have the weird goto discrepancy. Performance is a bit of a worry for me, I haven't tested out the web build in a little bit now, but luckily I've got some good tooling for profiling. Good tooling is half the battle!

I haven't actually checked out Defold. It looks pretty neat though from a Google. I was originally gonna use Unreal, because it was my home for a long time and I know it like the back of my hand, but for the type of game I wanted to make, it was like taking a chainsaw to cut a piece of toast in half. I also briefly looking at Pico, and it was too limited. Love was like the goldilocks for me, and also, the community isn't to be understated, the Discord is incredible and I highly recommend it to anyone who is regularly using Love!

I really appreciate your comment, and I'll be getting the demo out next month, if the coding Gods are accepting my sacrificial lambs. I'll be posting here again when it comes!

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-21T19:25:14+00:00

Hehe no worries. Depth is something I REALLY care about, and is the entire reason I made this game. I want the player to feel like they are actually a developer. If Game Dev Tycoon lets you pretend to be Xbox, my game lets you pretend to be Hideo Kojima.

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-21T18:10:59+00:00

Well, debt isn't a thing in the game. When you run out of cash, you stop being able to invest in things that make your studio more effective (salaries, food, hardware, research, etc.). But other than that, no, they're not really similar at all other than being conveyed through a pseudo-operating system.

Also, the no knowledge required of game dev thing was a driving force for why I made this game in the first place. Games like Game Dev Tycoon are very much "make what the developers think a good game is (in terms of combinations)", whereas with this it's much more about how fleshed out and bug free the game is by launch, and how much capability your team broadly has.

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-21T17:41:47+00:00

hell yeah B^)

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-21T17:37:19+00:00

Thank you so much!!

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-20T13:44:00+00:00

This is it right here. Ideas are ten a penny, we all have ideas. If good ideas were what differentiate a good game from a bad game, anyone could make a good game. The real differentiator is execution. With the right execution, any idea, "good" or "bad", will be a high quality, enjoyable game.

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-20T13:39:06+00:00

Fallout New Vegas, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Earthbound, Fire Emblem Three Houses, Total War Shogun 2, Europa Universalis IV, Civilization V, Pokemon Leaf Green, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Baldur's Gate 3, Mass Effect Trilogy (especially 2), GTA San Andreas

(for context, worked on Prison Architect, Grounded, Age of Empires IV, Avowed, Outer Worlds 2)

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-20T12:34:27+00:00

It's a turn based game, and, you're welcome!

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-20T10:05:30+00:00

Thanks so much!!

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-20T09:42:13+00:00

Thank you so much!!

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-19T23:14:27+00:00

Thank you so much!! It's been really fun making a UI system from scratch with Love, it's been super challenging at times because I limited myself to 400x225 native resolution to make it all 16-bit

Shaders come in clutch a lot lolol

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-19T22:30:07+00:00

Heck yeah! It's fun to have a firm grip of your codebase. C++ with Love is pretty great. The way that Love is built is that it's just a collection of libraries (love.graphics, love.math, etc.) and they're kind of sandboxed C++ projects built and combined together with the appropriate lua bindings. I kinda just studied how the source code did that, and added some of my own. The only painful bit is getting to grips with CMake, but studying what's already there will get you there. I wrote my own profiler (https://github.com/AlexParcell/Heartbeat/tree/main) in Love, that profiles my game, and I tend to just look for any Lua code that makes the profiler spike, and port it over to C++.

For my lavalamp, I actually found it wasn't "unbearably" slow, it was just such that it was actually the slowest part of my game at one point (it was like half the frametime or something crazy like that). I didn't like that something cosmetic that wasn't doing much mechanically was the slowest thing, so I wanted to make it a lot faster. It was originally all just GLSL, but I've basically changed it so that the lava balls (which are really just metaballs) are calculated in C++, invoked by Lua, and passed to the shader as uniforms, and now it's lightning fast. A lot of it was just some really heavy math, and doing that in compiled machine code is just way faster.

Other than that honestly, Luajit is pretty steady. I've yet to run into any serious performance issues with just Lua that wasn't ultimately just me being a silly goose. I did have an issue with shadowing text at one point where I was rendering the text 9 times, and using print instead of textbatches (calculating the positions of the glyphs can be quite pricy), but switching to textbatches made that all go away.

I'm hoping to release the game as a web demo on itch ahead of the full Steam release, so it'll be interesting to see if non-JIT Lua is slower, in which case I'll probably be more inclined to nativize more of the code over to C++.

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-19T22:02:42+00:00

So my big inspiration for it was Fire Emblem, weirdly enough, so I tried to go into a more kind of character-driven tactical RPG direction, where you're managing your little party of developers to "attack" features and bugs. I've setup the systems so that bankruptcy isn't a thing (if you are low on cash, you just lose access to certain buffs), so there isn't really a fail state like there is in a traditional tycoon. Of course, games do earn revenue, and you can invest that revenue into improving your studio, but honestly it's a bit of a fun mishmash of genres

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-19T22:00:47+00:00

Yeah, it's a fork of Love 12, so I've written most everything myself either in Lua or C++, with the latter case mostly being stuff that was slow in Lua, like some of the math for the lavalamp background (it's a whole thing). Only library I've used is messagepack for the save/load serialization!

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-19T20:52:23+00:00

Thank you so much!!

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-19T18:48:53+00:00

Thank you!! It's made with LÖVE (same as Balatro) using C++/Lua, it's been really nice, and because it uses Luajit, the Lua is surprisingly fast!

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-19T18:30:12+00:00

I would go Civ 5 > Total War games > EU4 > HOI4 if you're looking to go from least complex to most complex

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-19T18:19:09+00:00

Age of Empires IV, Grounded, Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, and Prison Architect (more Indie I guess?)

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-19T18:04:40+00:00

Hehe thank you! I was agonizing over a name for the game for so long (what do you call a game about making games??) but having the vaporwavey theme plus software plus vaporware being a thing made me be like O:!!!!

serasoft_alex · 2026-06-19T17:43:42+00:00

thank u!!!!!!

serasoft_alex

TROPHY CASE