Just 7 years after doing our Battle of the Lua Game Engines comparison between Gideros, Corona, Love and MOAI, we have finally done a hands-on review of the Gideros game engine. A lot has changed in 7 years, including the fact that Gideros is now free and open source, available on GitHub. It is a well documented, cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, Pi) 2D game engine capable of targeting all those platforms as well as the most popular mobile platforms including iOS and Android. One of the biggest strengths of Gideros is it’s Player application, enabling real-time testing over Wi-Fi, vastly improving the testing and deployment phases.
Thankfully you do not have to build Gideros from source, with downloadable installers available here. In addition to Gideros, I highly recommend you check out ZeroBrane Studio for a superior Lua development experience.
The following video shows Gideros Studio in action:
The code we created in the video above was:
local font = TTFont.new("Roboto.ttf", 64) local text = TextField.new(font,"Hello Cruel World!") text:setPosition(application:getContentWidth()/2,application:getContentHeight()/2) stage:addChild(text) function mainLoop() local x,y,z = text:getPosition() text:setPosition(x,y+1) text:setTextColor(0xff0000) end stage:addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, mainLoop)
You need to place a font named Roboto.ttf (or any ttf font, just change the parameter in the first line of code if you substitute your own font) in your assets directory for this to run.
If Gideros doesn’t appeal to you, but you are still interested in a Lua based game engine, be sure to check out our Love/Lua tutorial series available here.