Enigmanark

 So since my last post, I've been learning (very quickly mind you) Phaser. So far I've been working on remaking Type Stellar, an old game of mine I originally made in GameMaker Studio 2. It's coming along nicely. Phaser is pleasant to work with, and I have high hopes that all of this will work out and I'm finish at least R-Type Stellar: Rebirth, which is what I'm calling the remake.

 So, I've been absent from posting for quite some time, haha. Well, that's because I haven't really figured out what I'm going to do until recently. This past year, I really wanted to get serious about game-dev but with the baby that came back in November of 2022 that just didn't really work out too well. I really wanted to get serious and try to make a real career out of this passion, especially because of  my daughter, but that just didn't work out because it was really hectic and stressful alot of the time. But now, she's gotten older, going to be 1 year and 2 months old soon. Things are a LOT easier now, and, I think with the new year rolling around, I'm going to get things really going. Enter JavaScript, and Phaser I have decided to focus my efforts on using JavaScript with the Phaser engine. I think this is a great choice, because it's still code, but very powerful and easy to work with. Also, even though I'm not really a fan of JavaScript,

After the holidays I ran into a bit of burnout, and after resuming my work, I decided that after all the work I did with Rust, that Rust is not for me. It's very time-consuming to write and I'm not at all efficient or very productive in it.  Enter Nim. Nim is a language I've been interested in for a few years, but never really did much with it. I also really like the media library Raylib, and I've also never done much with it. Well Nim has some really good bindings to Raylib. So I decided to test this out. And here is what I made. NimRay Coin v0.8 It's a simple game where you collect coins. It's not at all fun, but the point is, I learned alot from it. And I think that Nim is now my favorite language. It's super fast, super powerful, and doesn't get in your way. It compiles down to either C or Javascript. But the best part? It writes like Python. So you can be super productive in it. It's frickin' awesome. I'll most likely be focusing on thes

 So I've been hard at work working on the stuffz. Well first of all, I will no longer be working on a generic use game engine with Rust. The reason why? Well basically, it's a pain in the ass. :) And there are already engines out there for that. I have come to the realization based on reading stuff on the web, and from a good friend, that this is kind of pointless? No general use engine will be as good as a dedicated engine specific to the game's needs. Besides, using an ECS I will have a lot of reusable code I can just copypasta instead of having some sort of generic lib. So as for the game I was working on, Retrosic II, I have decided I will be finishing it at least to the best my motivation allows me. So far it's going pretty well, but it wasn't initially. Due to Rust's memory model, I was having a hard time figuring out the design architecture of the engine without using an ECS. I initially was going to use ECS, then I decided meh too much overhead for a sim

So this is my first post on my new blog. My real name is Johnathan, and I make video games. :) This blog will mostly be a place where I post much longer posts about my projects, rather than the shorter stuff on twitter. Today I'd like to talk about my new engine I'm working on that sparked me to create this blog in the first place. That engine is called Mana. It's built ontop of the Macroquad framework, and uses the HECS library. Macroquad is a set of tools for the Rust programming language to create games, and HECS is an ECS library. ECS stands for Entity-Component-System. These are my 2 biggest tools I use in Mana. Right now I'm working on a project in parallel called Retrosic II which is a sequel to the original game I built years ago. It's really not much of a sequel, at least so far it's not planned to be, it's just a testing ground for Mana.