A few months ago, I spoke with a really knowledgeable gentleman who is currently residing in Brooklyn and working remotely as a programmer lead on the Wii version of the new Ghostbusters game, due out this summer. His previous project, for which he was the interactions lead, was Mushroom Men for the Wii. During the course of an excellent 20 minute conversion, he turned me on to Lua, informing me that these games are basically being written in Lua, with wrapper code tying in all the engine functionality. In my own game programming projects I was using Ruby at the time, with mixed results. Later, through my own research, I discovered that Lua is in fact the embedded scripting language of choice in the game industry, starting with it's use in 1997 in Grim Fandango (one of my favorite games, incidentally).

Just yesterday, at the IGDA Drink Night, I had the pleasure of meeting a newcomer to the NYC game development scene, recently hired at a local studio, coming from Arizona. He showed me his independent game project, which he was writing in a custom engine with Lua embedded. Through my own research about independent games, I've found that many others are using Lua as well (Aquaria is an example).

In the month or two that I've been now working Lua into my own independent game prototype, I've gotten it embedded, but having not been exposed to how the language is used in a professional environment, I'm unaware of the best practices typically utilized.

It just so happens that the person that turned me on to Lua has recently contributed a chapter of an upcoming game development book, dealing specifically with using Lua in a game engine for scripting. I will be purchasing a copy and studying it intently.

In the meantime, I was wondering if any programmers or scripters on this forum could talk a little bit about any of the experiences that they've had with using Lua in a game scripting environment, either embedding it into an engine as a programmer or using it as a scripting tool as a designer. Hopefully we can start up an interesting discussion.

alex k