Here’s a little multiplayer shoot-em-up game I’ve written with Codea. Enjoy!
Totally cool - love the particle effect exhaust (and explosions), love 2 players, awesome use of the controllers.
I am confused by firing - it seems to fire… where I tapped? but not always? Ah - I see, it’s not tap, but a drag.
Do the clouds do anything other than obscure vision? They should. block shots, perhaps.
There’s also no way to stop. Maybe that’s on purpose.
Needs reset when someone dies, and scorekeeping.
But - nitpicking. A+.
PS. I imported this with a “git clone” and “rsync” on my jailbroken iPad - it was a joy. We need to get away from cut/paste, anything non-trivial makes cutting and pasting unworkable.
Nat this is incredible. We were playing it for a while over lunch. A lot of fun.
I have some feedback on the gameplay.
- It sometimes feels a bit like luck when you hit the other player, I think this is due to the large spaces in between bullets. Maybe if everything moved a little bit slower? I guess Codea drawing operations need to be optimised a bit so this can run at a higher frame rate.
- I saw the printed instruction output, but I think a more direct method of explanation would be to draw a semi-transparent line dividing the screen, and label the top “Player 1” and the bottom “Player 2”, so people who don’t read instructions (like me sometimes) know where to put their fingers.
The ship control feels really good. Love the particle effects. It’s hard to know where I’m shooting sometimes, a more visible turret would be cool.
We need to get away from cut/paste, anything non-trivial makes cutting and pasting unworkable.
While understandable, I fear that this is one of the reasons that the powers-that-be will (continue) to hold up updates… 
(See the notice at the top of this page: http://sabonrai.com/wp/pythonmath/)
@Blanchot thanks for posting that. I thought other apps were allowed to have sharing features. The Codea 1.1.2 update contains sharing features and I may have to remove them, if this is the case.
@Simeon
Like many, many others, I’m extremely excited about Codea and sincerely hope that a way is found for it to continue to develop.
Ditto!
Hopefully we can remain under the radar if sharing is only possible with technical workarounds. I use libimobiledevice & fuse-unionfs on Linux to mount my Codea projects into the filesystem & overlay Git metadata. Not something that’s easy on mainstream platforms or for the non-technical user. It took me hours to get working & I’m pretty Linux-savvy.
Re. Pasting being the preferred way to bring in code: this makes no sense - its like “no interpreters” was, penny-wise and pound-foolish. It may have had an anti-flash goal at some point, but now it simply serves to worsen the user experience. It’s almost as if Apple is trying to encourage jail breaking. Sigh. Preaching to the choir, that’s me…
What’s worse - we’re not asking for anything JavaScript in the browser can’t do easily and automatically.
Simeon - can you embed JavaScript inside Codea? It should be allowed. That would make all sorts of things accessible that we’re waiting for now, and should be “playing by apple’s rules”. We could then simply implement libraries in JavaScript, wrapped in lua.
The clouds are just there to hide in. I think the planet should block shots & maybe be an obstacle the ships can crash into.
Firing: if you hold your finger down, you shoot in the direction of the turret and the turret stays fixed relative to the ship. If you move the firing stick you also take control of the turret and it aims in the direction of the stick independent of the bearing of the ship. So you can dogfight or play as a dual-stick shooter as you prefer.
Speedwise, the animator slices frames into max 100ms quanta, so gameplay & collision detection should be independent of framerate, but maybe the quanta is too long. And I think slower lasers would be aesthetically more pleasing.
I liked it, but why is the ship moving when you only touch the steering controller?
As soon as you launch the ship (by touching the controls) you can only speed up or slow down but not stop
Nice. I see that the gun on top the ship even rotates in the direction fired and the clouds move too. Excellent use of the dual sticks.
I’ve put a new version here: http://npryce-codea.posterous.com/planet-battle
This has some gameplay improvements as suggestd above. The ships no longer wrap round the screen. Instead the “camera” pans and zooms to follow the action.
re. the starmap - it shouldn’t scroll at all, really. It’s presumably backdrop, light-years away. Just render it before you scale and translate the window, and that would do, I’d think. PS. I like the moving window - consider making it wrap once it gets big enough. Between this and Andrew’s balls-and-sticks, I see a Star Control II clone coming down the pipe 
Such a cool game! Also it was so easy to import from your link… Thanks.