My son and I were playing a game called barrage on my old linux laptop day before yesterday. It’s a very old laptop so only old low graphics games run on this machine. We liked barrage. It’s a simple tank shooter. There is a gun positioned at the north-west of the screen, and the screen itself is a battle field and tanks come from the north or south and cross the field. You have to position a mouse crosshair and shoot as many as you can.

Simple game, I thought I can recreate it in a few days. So I started to build yesterday with the simplest game engine that I know - LÖVE. LÖVE - is a free, open source game engine written in Lua. Lua itself is tiny programming language which almost anyone can pickup in a few days. See - Learn Lua in 15 Minutes (tylerneylon.com). To get started on making a game - look at one of the tutorials at Category:Tutorials - LOVE (love2d.org).

So I was building the game, and getting amazed at all I could accomplish in less than a day:

1. Game objects drawn on canvas

2. Mouse input handling

3. Movement and game physics

4. Collisions and explosions with particle effects

Without the game art added here’s what the game screen looks like right now. The large green box is the player. The light blue boxes are targets moving across the screen. The tiniest dark blue boxes are bullets shot by the player. And finally the red boxes are explosion special effects called particles.

Given how simple this is, I believe everyone should make a simple game or two in their free time. Who knows what blockbuster game you end up making! Now whether it gets popular or not, I can assure you - you will have lots of fun building a game.

P.S. I’ll share a post when the game is done. Maybe you guys can try it out.

Have a great Sunday,

Abhishek (art noob)