/*/*/ Waiting for Godot no More

Postmortem of -FUTURE- LOVELESS

Welp, it's been 4 days since the last blog post and I wanted to update you folks on what's going on.

-FUTURE- LOVELESS is not much of a game, could've been more, but there wasn't enough time to make it happen, even as much of the other enemies inside were indeed programmed. It sucks, but everything else has been crazy.

First game with 'reasonable' enemy AI, first game with a pause menu, first game with cutscenes, don't get me started on...

First game as a full collab

Which is huge, I'll say that much. Working with Roligt and Falco was amazing, fighting time to make a nice thing come along. We'll still keep in touch, maybe work on another game in the future, but for now we rest happy with what did go well.

Now, onto the other thing....

Issues with Godot Engine

Y'know what's funny? This game was supposed to be for the Godot Wild Jam where you use solely the Godot Engine. Yet somehow the jam has actually permanently scarred my view of the engine.

First off, the engine crashes when loading and trying to listen in-editor to music files bigger than around 8MB. 8MB. That's a FUCKING PS2 MEMCARD'S WORTH.

I had to ask Falco to send me more compressed music just to not have that happen.

And then mid-way through development, turns out Godot sometimes just doesn't want to fire certain signals sometimes. There's NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING about the signal that doesn't work, the text to connect a function to it is all correct, and yet Godot just goes there and shrugs like oops, sorry.

And last of all, sometimes the variable exports, meant to allow customization of instances, don't work. What the fuck.

If my engine sometimes doesn't work properly it's a fucking liability. I refuse to just stand here and be ok with this, which is why I am not going to use Godot Engine anymore. Instead... I won't use any engine period. Godot was my favorite one for a reason, it worked where everything else was being godawful, and now I've lost all trust in it in a matter of 9 days.

So I'll be going back to developing games in C with just libraries, since if an issue happens it's entirely my fault and able to be fixed in short time. Godot Engine is open source but it's a massive codebase locked to a certain build system that takes plenty time to compile in my system. Amazing, right?

I've been trying out Zig as well and its compiler straight up can compile C/C++ normal. No more stupid Visual Studio crap! Perhaps in the future I may switch to using it for game projects as it is genuinely competing with C. For now though I'll use it as a way to make C games without needing a 6GB install, and capable of cross-compiling too.