What?
What is Lua. Well Lua is an interpretive programming language developed in 1993. Its has a long history of being used in games development
Why?
For us Lua seams like an obvious choice. However it’s often something unfamiliar and as such can seam overwhelming and you might ask why not use ‘insert your fav language here’ instead.
Off the top of our head here are the main strengths we see in Lua that lead us to choose it.
Syntax is easy to learn
It can take perhaps half a week to learn the basic syntax of Lua.
Learning it well enough to work professionally in it can take about 2 weeks. All in all that's a really short learning curve.
LUA Runs everywhere
Many languages claim the be able to run everywhere. For example C, Java, Javascript, C#(after a fashion). Lua can run in all the languages mentioned. This means that Lua can run in many languages that can run on multiple platforms.
Don’t believe us check out this curated list of those libraries on github.
Some game engines use LUA such as Love2D but you can run it on other games engines.
For example
- Any JS game engine. (see it’s one we have experience with but there are many others)
- Unity has a Moonsharp plugin that runs LUA in Unity.
- Unreal (We have no personal experience with this unfortunately)
LUA is Free
Lua doesn’t bundle with complicated licenses or expectations and as such makes it easier to use as a scripting language.
Where
If you want to lean more about LUA start with some of these links.
We are not associated with any of the links above