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posts dated from: may 2013

Doodle Post

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Dev Log: What the hell am I doing?

Dev Log: What the hell am I doing?
I'm not really sure what I'm doing right now. I'm kinda going all over the place if you can tell from my past two or three weeks of blog posts.

I got back from GDC and I saw what people were working on and I felt kinda crappy about putting all this effort into yet another AS3 game with Adobe AIR. The problem is performance. Flashpunk has a hard time maintaining 60 frames per second because of weird Flash things... it's just not that super stable. Offspring Fling is a relatively simple 2d game and for whatever reason some people with modern computers have a hard time running it at 60 fps and this is extremely frustrating for both them and me.

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One day I went through some of my old prototypes. I took a look at Gaiadi, my Ludum Dare game from three years ago (WHAT THE HELL HOW IS IT THREE YEARS OLD ALREADY.) One of the most disturbing things about it was how smooth it ran. The Game Maker run time is actually pretty dang impressive and it runs at a solid 60 fps, especially when compared to flash. This made me actually feel pretty bummed because Offspring Fling isn't nearly as stable (at least in my eyes.) It's one of those moments where I asked myself "am I somehow getting worse at making games?"

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So I want to learn something new... but then I've already put all this work into this AS3 framework that I'm using. The amount of friction to start on something new is really tough, because right now in AS3 making things is extremely fast and efficient because I've solved a lot of my issues and have a bunch of helper classes with super fast solutions to common problems across my projects. AS3 just also has a ton of useful libraries that I make use of like TweenLite and AS3Crypto.