So I got really unmotivated over the course of the last few years. My hobby project got put aside and thne there always seemed like something new to come along and take my time away. Family, Covid, Lockdown Depression and more. Still in my heart my text adventure project has never been far from my mind.. hell it has been for over a decade now. I still trry to keep uptodate with various things.. nothing major.. just follow some programming reddits and read gamedev blogs and stuff. Anyway.. I started to notice that a lot of people were whispering about some programming language called “haxe”.
So I thought I would check it out… and the little experience I have in it has been extremely positive. Haxe is basically a cross platform language that not only compiles binaries on most targets, it also can literally created source code for a number of other languages. I saw it mentioned recently by the main dev branch of Debian as the “universal language” and as a hobbits this is extremely appealing. If I could get good at haxe, I wouldn't be limited by other language options. I mean I could use haxe to write C#for unity, or C++ for Unreal… and so on. Now I get that these “converted” src files would probably not be as optimal as an expert programming in that language.. but I am no expert… nor do I intend to be. I am a total “ok it works.. what is next” type guy and the kind of games I am interested in can be played on cpus that run wrist watches nowadays… so optimization is not really a big issue. Now there are always going to be some functions / way of doing things now available in haxe on the target src… I am also ok with that…
KHA
…. but after playing about a bit I found two projects that really interested me. Kha which is a low level graphics and sound framework.. this is kind of like SFML or something. I taught myself the rudimentary concepts of programming using SFML, and it always appealed to me as I had to build everything from nothing and this taught me a lot about all the things that interested me. The kind of games I want to make do not need collision, or 3D orr anything complex.. basically they just need to display images, input text and play sounds. This could be a great place to look into restarting my project. The plan was always to rebuild the text adventure to be more like a Legend Entertainment game, but with text input.
HaxeFlixel
…. Then there is HaxeFlixel. This game a fully developed haxe 2D Game Engine.. with a ton of awesome classes to handle collision detection and all sorts of things. Even though I would probably not be using a lot of what this app has to offer.. the fact it dose its thing so well, could mean I can jump right out of the gate with more complex stuff, rather than constructing my own engine as I would have to with KHA.
So what now?
Well.. I have to say I am feeling really motivated again for the first time in ages. I bought some Haxe books and have been working through the, The language is super easy, I hear it is like ActionScript but I have never used that so I have no idea…. but I miss Visual Studio and Visual Assist. The dev environment I am using is vCode. All in all I feel like this is something to get excited about. With my old C# project I tried some tests of producing binaries on Mac and Linux and it was a true pain… with haxe.. I literally just select the target platform and build.. and it just works. There is a lot more complex things you can do, like add code only to be used on certain platforms. I'll probably have to do that if I plan to build a android version…but all that is super down the line.
So these are my new goals…
- Go through the two books I have bought, do the exercises and do not skip anything. I think in the long run this really helps. You learn a lot of redundant sutff, or things you can probably work out on your own. Still I like the feeling of a more holistic starting point.. than basically knowing nothing.
- Build a basic interface to graphically collect user input, like how say Space Quest dose it.
That is it for now!
Anyway…
Have Fun and Roll HIGH
--A4L
