Tuto tiny-ecs beatemup Part 1 Setup

Setup

As mentionned in the introduction, we will use the Gideros Game Template1.

So make a copy of your Gideros Game Template1 and rename it to anything you want, eg.: "Gideros_BeatThemUp".

Project Properties

• Scale Mode: Fit Width (or anything else really :-) )
• Logical Dimensions: 360 * 640 px
• Orientation: Landscape Left
• FPS: 60 VSync On

Feel free to configure the other tabs.

Plugins

• Bump: to handle collisions
• JSON: to save user preferences to disk

We need to add the "plugin" for tiny-ecs, please grab it Media:tiny-ecs.lua (tip: right click and save link as) and put it in the "classes" folder.

Note: the file is supposed to be tiny-ecs.lua but MediaWiki puts a Capital letter :-(

We will add more Classes later on.

Files and Folders

This is how I organise my files and folders:

Gideros_BeatThemUp (root)

• Plugins
  • Bump
  • JSON
• Files
  • _C (folder) ECS Components
  • _E (folder) ECS Entities
  • _S (folder) ECS Systems
  • audio (folder)
  • classes (folder)
  • fonts (folder)
  • gfx (folder)
  • scenes (folder)
  • init.lua (file)
  • main.lua (file)

The underscore (_) allows us to group the ECS folders.

In the folder classes, you should already have:

• Media:buttonMonster.lua for player control and keyboard navigation (tip: right click and save link as)
• "save_prefs.lua" to save data persistently (please see code below)

require "json"

function saveData(filepath, value)
	local contents = json.encode(value)
	local file = io.open(filepath, "w") -- create file
	file:write(contents) -- save json string in file
	io.close(file)
end

function getData(filepath)
	local value
	local file = io.open(filepath, "r")
	if file then
		local contents = file:read("*a") -- read contents
		value = json.decode(contents) -- decode json
		io.close(file)
	end
	return value
end

Assets

At the time of writing I cannot upload the assets to the Wiki. I found a solution by creating a special folder on GitHub and host the files there.

I am happy to say you can download the assets for this tuto at this address:

https://github.com/mokalux/gideros_wiki_repository/tree/main/tuto_beu_cbump_tecs_assets

and the zip file:

https://github.com/mokalux/gideros_wiki_repository/blob/main/tuto_beu_cbump_tecs_assets/tuto_beu_cbump_tecs_assets.zip

Next?

In the next part we will look at our init.lua and main.lua files.

Next: Tuto tiny-ecs beatemup Part 2 Init and Main

Tutorial - tiny-ecs beatemup

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• Main Page
• Lua API
• Main API
• Plugins