For the last few months, I’ve been working on Lude, a tool for building video games quickly.

Here is a video of me building Breakout in about ten minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy4uE8ZEqjA

If you want to try Lude, DM me.

Successes

• It’s possible to use Lude to quickly make a rough version of a non-trivial game.
• Lude is relatively flexible. I’ve used it for both 2D action games and a more document-like game based on tables and charts.
• I don’t know if Lude invented anything, but it has some useful concepts for rapid software development. Some I haven’t seen used recently. Some I haven’t seen used anywhere.

The techniques in Lude that make it quick to build games

High level, the quick building comes from two things:

• Direct manipulation of the live objects in the running game.
• Expressive, fast code generation.

Direct manipulation of the live objects in the running game

The direct manipulation part is mostly well-trodden ground. Drag objects to position them. Drag an object’s corner to resize it. Create a sprite by drawing directly onto the game. Click an object to select it for further editing.

The magic comes from syncing the editor with the running game so the designer manipulates the live game objects.

The genesis of Lude came from noticing that traditional level editors are not in sync with the running game. The designer makes an edit to a level, then fires up the game in a separate window to try it out.

In Lude, edits are synced into the game, and state changes that happen in the game are synced into the editor.