#haxepunk

Here’s a very-work-in-progress screenshot of a little game I’m working on as a practice in learning HaxePunk! It’s a fairly simple top-down adventure game about surviving a haunted house that’s filled with skeletons. (Probably not quite so many skeletons as this screenshot would imply, I’m currently playing around with spawn rates.)

Graphics are very placeholder right now -- green square is the player, brown squares are doors -- and I’ve only just today figured out how to start implementing a basic pathfinding AI, but I’m really happy with the progress I’ve been able to make on it so far, especially going into this project totally unfamiliar with Haxe and having a really limited amount of spare time to work on it each week. Up next is gonna be adding in a basic combat system, figuring out pathfinding across multiple rooms (currently only enemies in the same room can move), then after that possibly figuring out win condition stuff.

It's been a week since I decided to try Luxe. When I started game programming, it was still the time of Flash, I decided to use FlashPunk as game engine. And it’s natural that when I ' heard about Haxe I decided to use HaxePunk. HaxePunk was powerful enough to achieve what I wanted.

HaxePunk is a really great engine, it contains all the necessary tools to make 2D games, with the help of HaxePunk I learned most of the basic concepts of game programming. Unfortunately I also reached it limits which are the same as FlashPunk after trying to find a way to add the features that I needed, to review how HaxePunk does certain thing, the camera to find how to perform rotations, trying to find a way to know the axis of a collision, etc. I gradually discouraged.

I heard more and more about a new engine through Twitter and Haxe.io that one day I told myself that I had to try it by myself  and so I started testing Luxe. Most of the problems that I had with HaxePunk was solved easily, the only annoying thing was that some functionality of HaxePunk have become more complicated to implement than with this one, but I decided to devote myself entirely to Luxe yet.

I would not say that one is worse than the other, but I think that HaxePunk starts getting old, This time I have the impression to be one of the last to use it, the forum is no more active, I can not see really article about it on the internet and nobody takes care of its maintenance, through the Luxe community and its creator, I find this common motivation and who was beginning to lose with HaxePunk. Luxe is also a much more permissive engine, which allows to make "3D", the way the engine renders the image makes the shaders more powerfull, etc.

Here’s a playable version of how far I got with my test game so far. Only a few things are left to do: figure out and use texture atlases, add score/health indicators, and of course make sure that when you hit walls it does something.

HaxePunk v2.5 is out! Checkout the CHANGELOG for all the new addition's and bug fixes.

Also HaxePunk are now on twitter! Go and follow!

This is pretty awesome, the BabylonJS Engine has been ported to Haxe and using OpenFL bringing Babylon to all platform's - except Flash. Head over to the official website to checkout the three demo's.

BabylonHX was one of the eleven 3D engine's added to the list of Haxe libraries along side seven physic's libraries added this week by Allan Dowdeswell.

Max the author of the LÖVE port, HÖVE, has started a forum for help, issue's, feature request's and more.