It’s been several months since I posted anything here and just as long since I did any real game development work, but I’m back.  I haven’t been completely idle during all this time.  I’ve continued playing with different game engines and experimenting with small projects.  The core problem is that I just can’t find something I really like. 

For going on 15 years now I’ve wanted to write a game that was playable in a browser for free.  I’ve thought about different ways to monetize such a game but honestly, that’s secondary at this point.  I just want to finally make something.  I don’t want to use a platform like Steam because I don’t want to be tied to producing a completely finished product before releasing it.  I want to create a game in chapters and release them over time, then have the ability to go back and rebalance previous content on the fly.  Also, I don’t want players to need a client (or even an account) to play my game.

As I said, I’ve looked at numerous libraries and engines.  Phaser frustrates me to no end.  MelonJS is hard to follow.  Godot is awesome but I don’t like the way games get exported.  GDevelop has the same issue.  Maybe I’m just picky or lazy because I don’t want to spend the effort to actually learn the tools that are available, but in any case I just can’t get motivated to use any of them.  There are only 2 libraries I’ve ever really liked.  First is Three.  Unfortunately, that’s obviously a 3d library and at this point doing anything in 3d is just outside of the scope of what I’m practically capable of doing.  The other is CreateJS.  I’ve known about CreateJS for years and I appreciate that it is simple and intuitive.  It doesn’t hide too much from me or try to do too much for me.  That has good and bad effects.  I can write some code using it and can really tell what is happening, but then it obviously doesn’t have many features of a “game engine.”  Still, it’s what I’ve decided to use because I have been able to create some of the most very basic features of a game in just a few days using CreateJS whereas I spent weeks just trying to understand the interface of Godot, or how to do simple things with Phaser or MelonJS.  One big downside of CreateJS is that it isn’t actively developed any more.  I haven’t found any issues with that up to this point, and it’s open-source so I can always change it myself if necessary.

So that’s the plan for now.  I’m working on a simple, small 2d CRPG using CreateJS as the basis for a custom engine.  I’ll post more about the game’s story, and possibly even a very small demo of where I’m headed within a few days.  2020 was a garbage fire and I wrote it off completely, but I’m trying to be positive for 2021 and one of my big goals is to finally publish a finished game this year, so stay tuned.