Hello there, Abstract_Panic is here. I am the only programmer for Croaking Hill. ;)

We released our little demo almost 2 weeks ago.  So I wanted to talk about tech and give you some ideas on what I am working on right now. 

The demo was made using the engine I built with Haxe and Kha. It was my first experience developing a game while having almost full control over what's going on in the game. Before my "Haxe era" I was mainly using Game Maker.

 So it was a big jump for me to develop my own thing. It was amazing for educational purposes, but it resulted in some really bad decisions at the start, which made the demo a lot harder to make (and a little bit less ambitious and dynamic that we wanted to)

But still, the demo was supposed to be our little field of experiments.

Now, after the demo, with all that knowledge I decided to rewrite the game from ground up to fit our goals. (I didn't switch from Haxe or Kha, by the way)

The editor is one the few things that needs to be as good as possible for long-term development. Here is a progress I made so far with it:

I picked Dear ImGui now, instead of writing my own ui, which wasn't the best idea even then.

The other big thing is a scripting language. We need something fast (to use) to manipulate dialogs, cutscenes, game state. The demo was a disaster in this regard. I wrote my own little scripting language for dialogs:

I admit, this one is not that bad, it helped a lot, because it was very specific in the design.

But then we had another one, which was controlling the cutscenes:

And it was really bad at pretty much everything it did.  

But that was not even half of a problem. We also had "scripting" boxes that executed some code that was hardcoded into the engine.

And so the process of adding story events into the game wasn't remotely straightforward. You had to add dialogs into the dialog language, ad cutscenes in another one, add scripting boxes to execute some gameplay stuff. It was a nightmare. And I didn't even tell you about them interacting with one another.

And so I got rid of all of it. And introduced Lua into the full game:

Now Lua side will be responsible for pretty much anything gameplay related. 

The other one I am really excited about is FMOD.

In the demo we used Kha's audio system, that needed you to recompile the project everytime you add audio or music. As you might expect that wasn't really user-friendly. FMOD is sent to us by gods, because audio people can add and change audio without me. (except we don't have any audio people, but that's another story)

I also played with lighting, this one is a little bit extreme,  but you should get the idea.

The game is really early in the development, but I am excited. ;)