nya Resident
This game is scratch built in Lua in some free time I have had over the past 5~ days.
Initially started with just cells that change color, and green/yellow for food. Then added a sprite sheet, and realised (with some feedback) I was missing a few critical features:
  • Snake could not "pause" for one frame before edges and collisions (iframes?)
  • Sprite sheet was limited and could not handle "turns"
  • Grid was not dynamic, could not change size
  • Adding a menu, and support for multiple players would've required massive restructuring the code
So, obviously... I started over.
I did however distract myself for a moment with a feature complete high-score tracker, I've shared the code for that in Discord!
Anyway, since then I've added a few more features:
  • Lua object (metatable) for the player, allowing easy reset that state, and later multiple players
  • Lua object (metatable) for the world, allowing for dynamic grid size
  • Sprite table for simplified lookup i.e.
    SPRITE_LOOKUP.HEAD[direction]
    , and
    bit32.bor
    logic for turns
  • Sprite font rendering for the score, and game over message
  • State management, and render on demand (update methods return
    true
    if we need to render)
  • Error catching during update/render loop (see the blue screen screenshot!)
I do plan to share some more findings once I've had a chance to start looking at multi-player (and separate scripts that buffer controls), plus some menu logic.
Finally, I want to say that Lua brings a lot of convenience to the
table
. It allows for the creation of objects with methods (organisation and encapsulation), wrapping events with callbacks (again more encapsulation), and ease of data lookup; with in-memory (key-value stores), and multi-dimensional arrays.
Given the above, don't think I would have attempted to build this in LSL. It would have taken at least five times longer, and managing strided lists would have been quite challenging. Additionally, if I needed to revisit the LSL code later, it would have been difficult to debug and maintain.
secondlife://Aditi/secondlife/SLua%20Mesa/217/245/23
Snake Game (WIP)

Snake Game (WIP)