May 2, 2023
Category: Posts
Author: Charles
Babylon
Over the last month I investigated alternatives to the Unity3d game engine. In particular, the Javascript based Babylon engine (I took a look at Tyrian too, but it is 2d only so I moved on). Now there is HexTacToe, an incredibly simple hex based tic-tac-toe game created as a Scala.js and Babylon.js proof-of-concept. Play it here and the code is on Github here. I still need to clean it up a bit, but the functionality is all done. The point has been proved, all these technologies play nicely together. There was the occasional frustration, but overall it went quite well. I am impressed. There is not the community or game tooling available for Babylon as for Unity. However, there are other benefits. Definitely something for me to think about. I will need to write that post on pros/cons of different engines from my point-of-view.
April was the month highest gamedev hours since starting this fulltime, largely because I would not give up on the problems integrating the technologies in HexTacToe (it always felt like I was so close to getting it working, and I generally was). A nice target for me to aim for again in future, but not this coming month. There is a long list of non-gamedev tasks to get done that I have been ignoring since before going to Adelaide in March. So I’m lowering expectations for May. Gamedev-wise it will be mainly reading and experimentation.
Done last month:
- Updated hex lib & started scala ink (skink) library
- HexTacToe - simple hex based tic-tac-toe game as a Scala.js and Babylon.js proof-of-concept
Tasks for this month:
- Clean up HexTacToe for ideas on common libs and patterns
- Next IPO prototype?
- Move new engine experimentation?