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shmup ereader

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2026 6:19 pm
by vilmibm
i'm using love2d to turn books into procedurally generated shmups. it's fun.

Re: shmup ereader

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2026 6:33 pm
by acdw
oh yeah how's that going!!!

Re: shmup ereader

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2026 10:12 pm
by dozens
i'm using love2d to turn books into procedurally generated shmups. it's fun.
i politely demand to hear a lot more about this

Re: shmup ereader

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2026 10:55 pm
by vilmibm
- big text file like a book from project gutenberg
- run through my cutup code from trunkless to produce a list of phrases
- phrases are enemies and come flying from the right; bosses are bigger font sizes with more hp. waves fluctuate and get harder/denser over time
- you are a little @ that can fire punctuation to break down the enemies, they drop letters
- you pick up the letters to spell out stuff like life extends, special attacks, invincibility, etc
- every text file is checksummed and your score is ranked on a leaderboard so people can compete on some edition of moby dick

so far my code can turn phrases into enemies (letter clusters where each letter has HP), they fly at you, you can shoot, there's collision. it's feeling very fun and good but i have a long ways to go.

Re: shmup ereader

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2026 10:56 pm
by vilmibm
oh also the file checksum is the seed for randomness so every body's moby dick level is the same with the same drops

Re: shmup ereader

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2026 11:02 pm
by owl
oh also the file checksum is the seed for randomness so every body's moby dick level is the same with the same drops
incredible

Re: shmup ereader

Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2026 1:07 am
by archenoth
oh wow. that's such a neat idea??

i'm super-curious how hard it would be to finish, like, a legit book while pew pew pewing dudes

Re: shmup ereader

Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2026 4:01 am
by acdw
omg at the end have an AR quiz on the plot for bonus points

Re: shmup ereader

Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2026 5:36 am
by LennaROM
this vaguely reminds me of that game called lose/lose that was a shmup where each enemy represented a file on your computer, and if you killed it, the game deleted the file LOL

Re: shmup ereader

Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2026 6:16 am
by vilmibm
lol