State Of Flux

There has been some turmoil with the project lately, and I thought I'd take some time to discuss it. The really short version is that I'm considering moving to a new engine, and I have been experimenting with it instead of working on the Godot build.

About a month ago I ran up against what appear to be some bugs in Godot 4.2. Sometimes the Windows build of my game would stop playing the main background music at the end of the song instead of looping. The looping feature is built into the engine, I didn't code it up. You check a box to enable looping, and make sure that you import the music file with looping enabled, and it will just loop. Except when it doesn't. On my big rig, while playing the game from inside the engine itself, it seemed to always work, but running the build on another machine was problematic.

Another bug that I stumbled across was causing random crashes of the Linux build, when testing on my 5th gen Core i5 MacBook Air. It was dumping error messages on the command line, but none of them led me to a fix, or even the cause.

I really enjoyed my time with Godot. It's very easy to use, possibly the easiest engine of the "big three". All of my Godot work is preserved on GitHub, in case I ever decide to work on it again. Now, however, I'm trying out Unreal Engine 5.3.

This has brought about a shift in the project. With Godot I was content to develop a 2D game, as Godot is really strong there, but Unreal's strength and potential lie with 3D. Indeed, Unreal is famously awful for 2D. I have begun rebuilding the game prototype as a 3D game, as I learn how the various parts of Unreal actually work together. It's quite the learning curve, so far. Everything about the look and feel of it has changed, and none of the artwork from the 2D version has been transferred to the new version. Music and sound effects may carry over, though. Most of the actual game play mechanics will translate into 3D.

Instead of moving to c++, I have embraced Blueprint for this transition.  There seems to be almost nothing it can't do, and I have enough experience with c++ over the years to know that I really don't like c++.

I do not have an Unreal build of the game ready for testing yet, but I do have some things working in it already. I have a basic map, with terrain and water, and a controllable character that utilizes click to move and WASD movement. I also have the initial foundation of a hideously ugly HUD system to display typical action RPG things like health and mana. I'll probably have a working build of it fairly soon for people to try out.

Meanwhile, the old 2D version, built in Godot, is still available here. The gameplay aspects of it are still valid, and I'm open to suggestions about how I might improve it, even if those improvements will likely end up in the new Unreal version. I haven't given up on Godot, I still believe it has a very bright future, and may eventually evolve into the greatest engine of all time.