Luola II

A fast-paced cave flying splitscreen game for 2+ players.

Luola II is a modernized remake of the original Luola, which itself was a clone of/homage to the cave flyers popular in the Finnish shareware scene of the mid 1990s.

Features:

• Splitscreen play for 2+ players
• Configurable key bindings for 4 players
• Gamepad support
• Pilot ejection for platformer mode!
• Lua scripting, including per-level custom scripts
• 22 special weapons to choose from
• Destructible terrain
• 100% artisanal code and art: no gen-AI used!

Roadmap to 1.0.0

The "finished" 1.0 version will have all the good features from Luola, as well as few new ones.

Planned features:

• Multiple selectable ship types
• Sound effects & music (pending release of SDL Mixer 3)
• Special playmodes such as timed battle with sudden death
• Neutral and hostile stationary objects: jump gates and turrets

Instructions

Key bindings: up to 4 players can share a keyboard. The bindings can be edited in the Controls menu.

The following keys can be used in menus:

• Arrow keys: move cursor
• Enter, or any player's Fire1 button: select menu item
• Esc: return to previous menu or end round
• F12: toggle debug mode

Ship controls:

• Turn the ship with Left/Right keys or right thumbstick
• Accelerate with the Up key or left thumbstick.
• Fire primary weapon (unlimited ammo) with Fire1 key (East button or right trigger on gamepads)
• Fire secondary weapon with Fire2 key (South button or left trigger on gamepads.)
• Land on a base to repair and rearm
• Eject the pilot by hitting Fire2 when the ship is spinning out of control, or at any time by pressing Down+Fire1 (or left+right shoulder buttons on a gamepad)

Pilot controls:

• Walk/parachute/swim with the left thumbstick or WASD
• Shoot with Fire1 button (gamepad East/right trigger)
• Jump/jetpack with Up key or gamepad North button
• Activate parachute and/or aiming mode by holding down Fire2 (gamepad South/left trigger)
• Summon a new ship with the eject button combo when standing on a base

Winning:

• Number of rounds needed to win the game can be set with Left/Right keys in the player selection screen
• Last player left wins the round
• If all players are destroyed, the round ends in a draw

Build instructions

Dependencies:

• Rust compiler
• SDL 3
• SDL 3 Image
• SDL 3 TTF

Install the Rust compiler and dev packages for SDL libraries. Run cargo build --release to build an optimized release binary, or cargo run to quickly just run the game! (Tip: make a symlink from data to target/debug/data) The game will look for the data directory in the following places:

• Same directory as the executable
• Location explicitly specified with the --data <path> argument (TODO)
• Linux: XDG data directory (~/.local/share/io.github.callaa.luola2/luola2/)