Hack ‘n’ Slash now 1.0 and Extra Hackable

http://www.doublefine.com/news/comments/hack_n_slash_now_1.0_and_extra_hackable/

by danso • 12 years ago

68 18 12 years ago

imslavko2• 12 years ago

I have never heard of it but watching videos it seems to be a puzzle game with an interesting game mechanics: you can "change the code game is executing" right inside the game.

kevingadd• 12 years ago

It's not a facade or a gimmick, either; they ship a lua decompiler and the hacking UI is based on decompilation/recompilation of the game scripts.

imslavko2• 12 years ago

I didn't know that! It looked like a carefully prescripted game feature, but decompiler and real assembly make it even more interesting. :) (I already bought the game)

snogglethorpe• 12 years ago

Is the portion of the code the user can hack being run in a separate sandboxed execution context, or can the user really change everything written in Lua should he try hard enough...?

riffraff3• 12 years ago

grim fandango was written in lua? :O

LBarret• 12 years ago

the game engine was likely c++, and the scripts (Fx, behaviors, etc) were in Lua. It's a common setup.

riffraff3• 12 years ago

my surprise was that this was true 17 years ago :)

akavel2• 12 years ago

...and Far Cry, and Baldur's Gate, and WoW, and Angry Birds, and...

Lua is ubiquitous in game programming (as a scripting language), see e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lua-scripted_video_gam... or browse through some game programming related job openings.

danschuller• 12 years ago

I wish is a little bit more ubiquitous everywhere else. It's a great language and would have been a far better Javascript!

riffraff3• 12 years ago

I should have added "already", I know lua is very common now, I didn't know it was common in 1997.

deeviant• 12 years ago

They weren't quite "written" in lua, but more had their higher level logic (events, stats, game logic) scripted in lua.

It's kind of a small point, I just don't want somebody to get the idea to write an actual game engine in lua.

sspiff• 12 years ago

My brother had a demo of Grim Fandango in a ZIP archive, and it didn't include the Lua DLL. When we reran it years later, we first had to recompile Lua (3.1?) before the game would run.

That's how I learned it was using Lua. I believe it was the first large scale use of Lua in a game, certainly the first I encountered.

Hack ‘n’ Slash now 1.0 and Extra Hackable

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