Welcome to the Lua tutorials.
This series of tutorials will be aimed at the complete beginner programmer, and will teach you Lua while learning to develop small games that will run on your Sony Playstation Portable.
Before we get started there are a few things we will need. Not all are required, but it will make it easier to follow along.

• LuaPlayer - Gotta get this, so go ahead and grab it first.
• LuaPlayer for Windows - Saves you tons of time not having to transfer files back and forth to your PSP. We will be using this with the tutorials, so be sure to download this.
• ConTEXT Editor - Great text editor. Highlights keywords in many languages. Not at all required. You can use Notepad or any other editor.

• Extract the contents of the downloaded file.


• Inside the folder you extracted the files to create a text file with Notepad. Inside the file type



luaplayer script.lua
pause

Save the file as script.cmd, and make sure it doesn't save with a txt extension. This is the file that will run your program on your PC. luaplayer runs the luaplayer in the folder, and script.lua is the name of our file that we will be programming in. Pause will keep the command box from closing when we get an error. This way we can debug our programs.
Note: Some people may receive an error when clicking on their cmd file that says something along the lines of
'luaplayer' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file
If you receive this error then try putting the whole directory name that your files are in into quotes. An example would be:
"C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Desktop\mygame\luaplayer.exe" script.lua
pause


• Now create another text file with Notepad (or any editor such as ConTEXT) and name it script.lua (Note: If you get an error about script file not found when you try to run this on your psp, you may need to rename the file to index.lua). You can leave this file blank inside for now. This is the file we will code in later.

Writing Your First Program