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This last month of April was a patchwork of different things for me with Ludum Dare 35 appearing in the middle. Before LD35 as I normally do, I took time to look at some alternative tools/languages to the Unity3D C# set that I usually use.  The LD competition is a great time to learn something new. There is no better motivator than a hard deadline. There are many game creation tools out there and they are constantly being update/upgraded and new ones come online all the time. There are a few that I look at again at least every few months to see how they are progressing. Here is a list of some that I either read up on or tried out:

  • Atomic Game Engine – An interesting javascript/typescript engine with a component-based architecture and a Unity-like editor. I really wanted to like this one as I do want to get more into Typescript, but I found the editor controls and asset import capabilities to be lacking and clunky when compared to Unity3d.  That doesn’t mean I won’t revisit this one in a few months to see what has improved.
  • GoDot Engine – This is one of the coolest ones in my opinion, but in its current state as I tried it, it was unable to produce a stable WebGL build of one of the simple demo projects. That made it a definite no-go for the Ludum Dare competition. If you want more people to play your game in a compo, you should really have a web version available. People don’t like to have to take the extra step to download, then unzip, then double click to run your game. Games with installers are even less liked (I typically will not review compo game with an installer). Something else that I don’t like about GoDot is that while it is also component-based (which is good IMO), it uses its own made up Python-like language for scripting. Why not just use Python, or a subset of it or something?
  • Love2D – This one is a C++ engine with Lua bindings. While it uses one of my favorite scripting languages, it does not have an editor to help with asset importing or level design. Also, while there are some 3D libraries for it, the engine was not designed with it in mind as far as I’ve been able to determine.
  • Duality – 2D only C#, component-based, Unity-like editor. I haven’t tried this one out, but my general sense it that Unity3d would win this fight.
  • Unreal Engine – A big player in the game engine field. This engine is packed with features and is pretty much free unless you make a game that makes lots of money. Then you have to pay them, but I wouldn’t mind since that would mean I’d raked in lots of dough. My issue with this engine is C++. Yeah I know about the visual Blueprints scripting system, but as a coder, that doesn’t appeal to me. I also don’t want to deal with C++ crud when I’m trying to design a game. C++ is a strange thing for me. I like it, and I hate it at the same time.
  • Haxe Flixel – Mostly because this is a Haxe library and I think Haxe is really cool. It can transpile to many different languages (C++, Lua, C#, PHP, javascript) which means that the output from it can run on just about anything. I definitely plan on messing with this one at some point.

Every time I do this, I am reminded of how strong the Unity3d ecosystem is. For me, it gives me the most productivity and the widest platform reach with the best tools at this point in time. That doesn’t mean, however that I will stop looking for something better because after all programmers like shiny things.

Here’s what I’ve been doing since my last post:

  • PixiCubes was submitted to iOS and it has been approved, so go grab it here for free and leave me a nice review.
  • Looked into the Atomic Game engine which is an interesting free and open-source Javascript game engine that is very Unity3d-Like.
  • Ludum Dare 35 has come and gone and it marks my 21st consecutive successful entry called: Widget Workshop. Does it have potential to be something more? Maybe. We’ll see. I have lots of ideas for it, so it may show up again at some point. For now, though, go check it out and see what you think. Go here to check out all the jam games I’ve completed to date.
  • Released version 2.13 of Joysticker which is a Lua-based joystick to keyboard mapper. Nothing huge in the update but it helps to pave the way to Joysticker 3.0 which I’m excited about.

With all the Ludum Daring this month I figure I’ll either tack on another month to my game per month challenge, or release Android, iOS versions of Widget Workshop at some point. It kind of depends on whether I want to flesh it out some or not. TBD. What game will I do for the month of May? Gosh, I’m not sure. I need to ponder on this for a bit. While I’m pondering for the rest of the month, I’ll be working on Joysticker 3.0, maybe find time to submit the iOS version of Buggers, look at finishing the multiplayer stuff I had started for Buggers, and play with Atomic Game Engine some.

Well PixiCubes, #2 in the 6 month plan, is out. It’s currently available for Pc,Mac,Linux, and Android. I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to do about releasing new cubes.  Each PixiCube takes up around 6-7 Mb which is quite a bit when you have several of them and certainly a lot for a mobile game. For now, if I release any more cubes, I will have to revise the code to do it, but if something unusual happens and a lot of people play it and like it, I will probably go in and make modifications so I can release new content without having to re-release a new binary. This would of course mean that I’d have to host the files on my site, but that should be fine. Something else I decided to do for this one was to put Ads in the mobile versions.  When you solve a face there is currently a 50% chance you’ll see an ad which isn’t too bad in my opinion. I also added a “Please Rate Me” dialog that comes up after you solve a whole PixiCube. I figure if the person plays the game long enough to solve 6 puzzles, then they probably like it enough to give a good rating. We’ll see. The game also has a tutorial which isn’t very long, but took me about 1.5 days to implement. I ended up doing some pretty big refactoring to my main game code so I could use many of the same methods in the tutorial. It worked out really well, and I remember doing the same for my first mobile game TerraForma.

I think today I will look into getting a build going for iOS and test it on the phone I have. If it works OK I’ll try to get it submitted to iTunes for an iOS release. At this point I just want someone to play it.

My plans for April are going to be flexible since Ludum Dare is next weekend. I’m going to spend next week getting ready and adding,fixing,polishing my editor scripts for Unity. There is a thought in the back of my mind that I should break from Unity for this Ludum Dare and try HaxeFlixel or Love2D. I’ve wanted to play with Haxe more and I’ve always loved Lua. I’ll think about it next week. I’m thinking that I may take whatever I come up with for this Ludum Dare (if anything) and try to polish it up and release it for my April project, but we’ll see. I’m off to do a Facebook post and a news post on this site for the PixiCubes release.