Hi everyone! It's been a while since I've posted one of these big updates (I'm not changing from the new update plan, though - hopefully they'll be as frequent as it says on the box in the future, which is what I'm planning but you can never really be sure...!) but here we are.

Just before we get into any technicalities I'll just say we're switching back to TypeScript, but there's a few good reasons for that which I'll get to in a second.

Programming

The first thing I'd like to get out of the way is the programming side of things. As you may know from recent(ish) posts, we've been switching engines quite a bit over the past few months, but there wasn't really any explanation as to why that happened.

In some ways, I love GameMaker, but it comes with a few limitations regarding the amount of control you have over your program. I decided to switch to a different engine because of this, and I looked around and tried TypeScript - the very same language that PS!Outertale (awesome game so far even though I'm not finished playing it yet- you should play it if you haven't already) was written in! So I experimented around with it and tried the PixiJS rendering library, but there were a few prerequisites to using it. For example, you have to set up a web server in order to get literally anything to work, and I'm convinced that it has some black magic involved. Since I'm obviously awful at web development, I decided to leave it and go on to find another language.

At the time I was studying C++ and though that it could be a great language to create a game in. It has all of these libraries that can be used for games and things alike. I ended up deciding on the whole SDL2 set - SDL, Image, TTF and Mixer! I have to say these work really well with really any programming language. However, C++ isn't really the easiest language to use.

So I decided to try Mojo, which is a new and developing language with speed and simplicity. Sounds great, right? Well, since it's developing still, it's got a lot of features on the roadmap that could be really useful but simply... don't exist yet - but there's great potential for the future. I tried using Helehex's SDL Bindings repository for this and it worked really well, but as mentioned before, Mojo still has quite a lot of missing features, so I decided the go back to TypeScript.

Why did I go back to TS, though? The answer is that the only reason that I ever abandoned it was because of my inability to work with the web... however, the Deno runtime allows me to use SDL with TypeScript, meaning I can use most of my C++ code in TypeScript itself!

That's basically it. I'm currently working on binding SDL to TypeScript but I'm pretty much almost finished (this is the easy part). Then I'll create the Twilight Engine, and the rest will hopefully go smooth sailing...

Artwork

There's not much to show on the art side of things really; mostly the coding's been the busiest. However, we did settle on a consistent art style: taking inspiration from Mother 3 and Oddity.

Not much else though.

Conclusion

Well, that's it for the devlog! Hopefully you enjoyed it, have an amazing [insert time of day] (it came up on autocorrect this time...) and see you next time!
- @JustYourAverageGameDev