Hi everyone :)

enough of product related posts lately right? it’s time for some devlog post :)

I’m a open source guy. Whenever i can use open source for something, it’s my first option. This is not why i want everything for free, it’s a philosophy and long term planning reason. Open Source never dies, you never lost “support” why in the worst case scenario, you can grab the code yourself and keep using it, updating, adapting to your needs. This is my first reason to use open source software. The freedom that i’m not tied to a future of a company to keep my projects up and running (actual and future ones). When i started doing games, flash was the main platform. Of course was not open source, but it was easy to use, fast, you could use flashdevelop to use an IDE only environment and the flash studio to make the animations. Oh, those where the good times. When flash started to die, well, i was in a predicament, as i was not good with editor environments (like unity has) and i don’t wanted to face the learning curve of learning a new language, editor, controls etc..

For that reason i started to use haxe / openfl, that was the open source replacement of AS3 / flash. I could use the same language syntax and the same IDE, and i was happy. Don’t get me wrong, haxe & openfl are awesome platforms, i’m even contributor on some code for extensions and addons on it. I made 2 games on it plus i have a very complex app unreleased that is made on it too. But this year i tried to improve my development times. Coding a game on haxe / openfl, even the simplest one it will not take me less than 2 months. i needed to get things faster, better. There wasn’t much ready to use in the open source world that would surpass openfl / haxe. I know about ogre 3d, illricht, game maker, construct, kha, no one of this would improve the workflow. Another goal was to make the transition to 3D, this would solve most probably one of the problems in the development, that was the creation and adapting the 2D assets to all resolutions, and get it into the code. Godot was a good option, is even made by a Juan, someone i know personally. In the end, i decided to go with Unity, for the support, but mostly anything, for the asset store support. The main objective was to improve the development time. I love to code, but my objective is to make games, not engines or extensions. With unity and very very little money, i could have ready to use code, like a FPS engine, or a tabletop to adapt or modify, or a social media extension ready to use for $10. Plus models and assets that can be easily imported and modified at my needs. When i started, godot didn’t had this, so i bet into going with the all popular option.

I released 2 projects so far. For someone that is not familiar with an editor, the transition was not easy. understanding the logic of “attaching” scripts to objects, wasn’t easy either. But i started using a ready to use isometric engine for Dumb Zombies Commander helped me a lot to understand the structure of everything, how collision works, how instantiate elements works, how to interact between scenes, etc..

The latest project, 5 Shapes was made from 0, with no pre-made code nor assets, applying what i learned the first time. It was made in a week. It is a simple game, but the development time was so fast, i can’t believe it (do the builds, screenshots, video and marketing took me more time than the game itself :P ).

For one part i regret not making the change earlier, for the reason of not wanting to face the time to learn a new platform, but on the other side, i had to implement some knowledge i learned with openfl / haxe into unity, mostly in 2 critical parts, the alignment of 2D elements on all resolutions (unity doesn’t handle this as it should) and the android / ios build process (unity packages from the assets store doesn’t give a shit about others packages, so you can easily end up with duplicate libraries in the project, that would broke completely the build process. if you don’t know the internals, you will never figure out this…)

And that’s all my friends. I hope my experience will help others developers on a similiar situation ! Don’t be afraid to change !