Re: Reviewer needed for a book Lua game development

Hi Mario,

That sounds interesting to me. In my spare time as a hobby I'm developing an online text-based game using Lua. It's far from finished, but I hope some day I will be able to release it.

I am using Lua to a certain skill, and I think I know enough about Lua to be able to review your book, but I assume you are coming across better candidates.

I am looking forward to your book. Here are some personal hints at subjects I am (humbly and partly) experienced in, you may include these subjects in the book.

Creating online text-based games... It's retro (I like that) and it is very easy to do using the Copas module. Of course things could be made more complex by handling the Telnet protocol and terminal control characters. One could also (read: "one is obliged to") add security measures like blocking clients that fail to login several times. Perhaps you know a way of using an encrypted network connection. I don't, so I will post a question in this mailing list in a few moments.

I think Lua + Copas is also an easy and appropriate framework to create a backend to graphical online games, even for mobile games that run on Android or iOS, because the backend only has to handle text commands received by the graphical client, apply the game rules, and then return the result to the graphical frontend. In that case, parsing the commands is easy and needs little error handling: the graphical client doesn't make typos and only uses the commands you designed it to... unless someone uses a terminal emulator and hacks his/her way into your backend. :-)

I also recommend writing a chapter about saving game states/data, by serializing tables or using SQLite3 to store your data into a database file. I personally like SQLite3. It's easy to incorporate it into a Lua application.

Have a nice day,

2014-03-06 21:13 GMT+01:00 Emeka <emekamicro@gmail.com>:

Hello,

If you can accept someone who is new to game, however interested to learn game development. Then add me to the bottom of your list.

Emeka

On Mar 6, 2014 2:57 PM, "Mario Kasuba" <soulik42@gmail.com> wrote:
Dňa 4.3.2014 8:49 Gary V. Vaughan wrote / napísal(a):
> Hi Mario,
>
> I don't have much experience with game development, but I know Lua extremely well, and have tech reviewed books for APress and NoStarch as well as written one of my own for Pearson. If you don't find someone more suitable, feel free to get in touch.
>
> Cheers,
>

Hi Gary,

It's expected that the reader won't have any experience with game
development or specific technologies except for Lua language of course.

By reading this book the reader should be able to understand how each
part of a game engine works. This includes: graphics, GLSL shaders,
sounds, artificial inteligence, path finding, events, networking and so on.
In the end he should be able to write his own engine, where everything
non-time-critical is written in Lua.

I expect the book will come with code samples too.

I think I could use your experience with tech reviewing and Lua language
as well. Let me know and I'll push your e-mail to the publisher. They'll
send you the details.

With regards,

Mário

--
Paco Willers <paco.willers@gmail.com>