October 30, 2019 – In the beginning …
Welcome to Digger Doggy! This is going to be a rambling almost-stream-of-consciousness devblog regarding A Pugz Life: Digger Doggy, an exploration game featuring a yet-to-be-named Pug.
Pug is a young and curious pug, starting off in their back yard. The player gets to move Pug through the back yard environment, exploring and digging, finding treasure to further their adventure.
I’d love for you to come back and check her occasionally to see how things are going, or follow The Monkey on Twitter at @kerfufflemonkey for semi-regular updates.
October 31, 2019 – Oh technology …
Game ideas are easy! What’s hard is the actual execution. How do you go from “Hey, I have an idea! I’m going make a game to fire small avians with a slingshot at structures that pigs have built” to actually holding that game in your hand and turning young children against bacon for life?
I find the hardest first step of game development not the game itself, but what game tools to use. Unity3D? Cocos2D-X? Unreal? Godot? Or native?
A lot of the decision comes down to the targeted platform. Most of my games are done for the mobile market, so that narrows down the field a lot for me.
Cocos2dx Tweeted at me to give Cocos Creator a try. I have done a couple games in Cocos2d-x before (Kitty Pops is a good example of one of my games in Cocos2d-x), but Cocos Creator moved to JavaScript-based (ewwww!) scripting.
What do you think about Cocos Creator? Let me know at @kerfufflemonkey
November 1, 2019 – Ok Cocos, whatchoo got?
Right, I’ve decided to try out Cocos Creator. I’m doing React and React Native development right now anyways, so how horrible can it be, right?
Oh yeah, Tiled! I forgot about this awesome tool for isometric and orthogonal tile maps! I used this tool a few years ago for some prototypes and quite liked it.
Got any other suggestions? Hit me up at @kerfufflemonkey
Nov 4, 2019 – The Devil You Know, Or Not The Devil You Used To Know
So for the last couple days I’ve been dabbling with using Cocos Creator for Digger Doggy.
I’d used Cocos2D-X for games in the past and quite liked it, which is what Cocos Creator uses ‘under the hood’.
After almost immediately finding a fairly critical issue with Cocos Creator’s IDE, seeing so many typos and poor translations in the documentation (it’s owned by a Chinese company now), the scripting language is JavaScript, and just having a general feeling of unease using the IDE, I’ve decided to stick with Unity3D … for now.