6 ms·
One of the biggest recent indie hits, Balatro, was made in Löve! I really like it, the developer experience is so smooth for beginners, just drag a zip onto th
by patapong 6mo ago
One of the biggest recent indie hits, Balatro, was made in Löve!
I really like it, the developer experience is so smooth for beginners, just drag a zip onto the exe and it starts. And the APIs are simple enough to memorize while allowing pretty cool rendering stuff.
- KeplerBoy 6mo agoBalatro ships with the entire unobfuscated Lua source by the way. I once checked if the odds stated on a card were implemented wrong. Turns out no, the code checks out, I'm just that unlucky.
- __s 6mo agotoo bad universe doesn't ship with unobfuscated source so that you could see whether you're unlucky, or just skill issue
- Tepix 6mo agoThe source is right there, you just have to grok it.
- Sardtok 5mo agoWell, it's kind of a machine code for a self-modifying compiler, so there's that.
- chii 5mo agoThe source is not just dna - that's just one type of architecture that exists. There might be others that operate on different instruction sets. The real source is mathematics. But some might say it's incomplete.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoMathematics is the FORTRAN of the real source. Closer to a real source is probably "real" things like atoms and other universal things. If I remember correctly, Stargate-SG1 at one point had some ideas about this sort of universal language, that multiple species could use for communication, as any sufficiently intelligent specie probably been able to see atoms and so on, but may have completely other way of doing "math-like" stuff.
- RobotToaster 5mo agoI'm still waiting for the slackers at CERN to finish decompiling it.
- m_mueller 5mo agothat's great, could read the source code on how to unify gravity and quantum mechanics for all energy levels? vibeing to a nobel price will be cool...
- lioeters 5mo agoGood news: the universe is written in LISP. Bad news: with no comments.
- latexr 5mo ago> the universe is written in LISP Ostensibly. Honestly most of it was hacked together with Perl. https://xkcd.com/224/ https://xkcd.com/224/
- mghackerlady 5mo agoI like to imagine perl was bootstrapped from forth and used to build a lisp
- dpcan 5mo agoYou can ask AI to comment an entire code base now in as much detail as you need.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- embedding-shape 5mo agoComments explaining what the code does, which is what an LLM could answer, are basically useless comments. Comments that describes why the code is how it is, is a bit more valuable, but also something LLMs cannot really reliably infer by just looking at the code.
- cableshaft 5mo agoI don't have to check the source code to know that for me it's a skill issue :/
- brooke2k 6mo agohahaha, I did the exact same thing after the game came out to see if wheel of fortune was really a 1/4 chance
- mh- 6mo agolol, love seeing that I'm not the only one who did this. Being suspicious of WoF was the first and last time I peeked at the Balatro source.
- QuantumNomad_ 6mo agoGame developers sometimes make the “randomness” favor the player, because of how we perceive randomness and chance. For example in Sid Meier’s Memoir, this is mentioned. Quoting from a review of said book: > People hate randomness: To placate people's busted sense of randomness and overdeveloped sense of fairness, Civ Revolutions had to implement some interesting decisions: any 3:1 battle in favor of human became a guaranteed win. Too many randomly bad outcomes in a row were mitigated. https://smus.com/books/sid-meiers-memoir/ https://smus.com/books/sid-meiers-memoir/ Some threads on randomness and perceived fairness in video games can be found here on HN too, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19399044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19399044 The original link being discussed in that thread is 404 now, but archived copies of the original link exist such as for example https://archive.is/8eVqt https://archive.is/8eVqt
- addandsubtract 5mo agoI think XCOM does this as well.
- bsimpson 5mo agoDispatch too. If your odds are above a certain threshold, the mission is a gimme.
- renewiltord 5mo agoGames like Battle for Wesnoth which have it implemented right, you’ll look at a 90-10 scenario with 2 attacks and end up with the 1% scenario. Enough to make a man rage. I have degrees in Mathematics, I am aware of statistics, and all that. And yet when I played that game I would still have an instant “wait what, that’s super unlikely” before I had to mentally control for the fact that so many battles happen in a single map. Was good because it identified a personal mental flaw.
- Levitating 6mo agoNot on steam does it? I can only see the exe and dlls.
- jared0x90 5mo agoextract the exe like a zip file, that's how love packages itself. last i looked at the source myself it had comments in still from the dev
- Levitating 5mo agoyep that works
- bsimpson 5mo agoI'm really curious how they do version control. The Steam version was created by one guy, but the platform ports have a couple different authors. The Google Play and Xbox PC versions, for instance, have divergences. I wonder how the ports influence the upstream and each other. How do they keep the codebases in sync, while also accounting for platform differences?
- embedding-shape 5mo agoCan't say for sure how Balatro did it, but typically you do one shared core and any platforms basically use that core in their own suitable way. Considering it's lua, would feel very natural and be relatively simple for Balatro to do it this way too. Not much to keep in sync, just ensuring the core remains reusable in the ways the platforms need it.
- bsimpson 5mo agoThe Android and Xbox PC versions look more like forks for a shared codebase. Most of the platform-specific code is abstracted to a bridge, but even the bridges aren't consistent across the codebases. (Android's save system uses different methods than Xbox 's.)
- PufPufPuf 5mo agoI know which card. We were all there. Are the odds wrong? "Nope!"
- pwillia7 5mo agocome on you can blame whatever the program is using for randomness still
- bsimpson 6mo agoIn case you're curious, here's a Nix derivation to make Balatro for any other system playable on Linux: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/by-name/ba/balatro https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/by-name/ba... I wrote half a blog post when I did the derivation. One day, I should finish it and post it here.
- pmarreck 5mo agoThat's awesome!
- Neywiny 5mo agoHaven't used it in almost 10 years but at least back then one sticky point was that unlike unity and the like, opening the exe didn't open an IDE. Just kind of a dummy window. Also building for Mac from Windows was a nightmare since my end user was not technically literate and it didn't just run on their end. But that's likely just a Mac issue
- eek2121 5mo agoA lot of indie devs actually are fine with decompiling/viewing source. Even the STS2 devs have no issue with this. I think it is great and helps the indie dev community. Seeing this has actually made me excited about game dev to the point where I'm beginning to dig in myself.
- vintermann 5mo agoSTS has a wonderful modding scene. Especially the yearly(ish) community mods which lots of people collaborated on, and the officially recognized Downfall mod, are very impressive and a great deal of fun. I think modability is a big part of the indie game success script, if there is such a thing. Even if modded players are a small share in numbers, I think they're often a backbone in the community an indie game needs to stick around.
- Lapel2742 5mo ago> One of the biggest recent indie hits, Balatro, was made in Löve! Moonring[1] is another one that that is written in Löve (apparently by the co-creator of XBox's Fable series). The base game is even available for free. I had lots of fun playing it. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2373630/Moonring/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2373630/Moonring/