So I've kind of went radio silent after the release of my first game POLY, there are a lot of reasons for that.

Right after that game came out, I started my first year in college here in Edmonton. I'm at NAIT (Nothern Alberta Institute of Technology) going for a diploma in Computer Software Development, so I was very busy with that from January to April of this year.

Me and a group of friends I made through the community decided we to make a game for the Flash Forward 2023 jam. We came up with the idea for the game and fleshed most of it out on paper very quickly. Excited, I started quickly working on it but realized early on it was beyond my scope of abilities, with only a year of programming experience and only one game under my belt, but was determined to finish it for the deadline.

That did not happen.

From the stress of the project and not making the progress I wanted, plus the stress of school, I had a really bad episode with anxiety at the end of February and development came crashing to a halt. I didn't know if I could mange school and working on the game at the same time, especially since I was running into all sorts of issues figuring things out that were beyond the scope of my knowledge.

Fast forward end of April as I'm finishing school and to be free for the summer, I really wanted to pick up working on the game again but in a more modern environment that would give me the tools I needed to get the job done, as lack of libraries and support for Flash 8 since no one really uses it anymore was really bringing me down and screwing me over getting what I wanted done. After a callout post for help on the forums, it was suggested to me that Flash devs had moved onto HaxeFlixel and that it would probably be good if I tried doing the same.

After doing the starting up RPG tutorial for Flixel and Discover HaxeFlixel by Leonardo Cavaletti, I've started picking up the bare basics of the engine and made a little prototype game based on a Flash game prototype I made when I was learning how to code in ActionScript.

Now that we're up to speed, here are my feelings on HaxeFlixel at the moment.

PROS

• Lots of built in libraries and packages written by other people, so there are a lot of tools to pick from depending on what you need done.
• The engine itself is built around making games, so there are a lot things built directly into it for making games that ActionScript didn't have, an example being pixel perfect collision detection and built in properties inside of classes specifically for making games.
• Active community and developers. The discord for HaxeFlixel is popping, with tons of people including George, the current maintainer of Flixel being incredibly supportive and active in helping others (myself included).
• Takes heavy advantage of Object Oriented Programming and does a fairly good job of making it's implementation fairly straight forward for it. Doing functional programming all in one main file in Flash was getting way too overwhelming with projects spanning thousands of lines of code, making it much too hard to maintain.

CONS

I hate to bring these up, I really want to like this engine but there's so much I'm not used to moving from Flash...

• This is the biggest one for me, but lack of a visual interface for working with game objects and seeing what the screen will look like before compiling. I am an incredibly visual person, having spent my life in software that has always had some visual representation of what you were doing (After Effects, Premiere, Flash, Photoshop, ect.) so having to move to a purely IDE environment has been very frustrating. I'm never sure how to place things through numbers alone, and designing interfaces or menus takes 50 times longer than it did in Flash. Again, I think given enough time I'll overcome with but it is quite a whiplash from what I'm used to, which goes to my next point...
• The compile times. I understand this is somewhat of a normal thing in modern software, but again being used to Flash, I like to change small things and immediately test them to make sure it's working as I expect it to as I go, and with Flash I hit compile and in like .2 of a second it's running. Whereas in HaxeFlixel, the quickest compile I can get as of now is through HTML5, which still ends up being 6.5 seconds, which adds up super fast when you test things as much as I do. Again, I feel like this harks back to me just needing to get used to such a drastically different environment than I'm used to.
• Having to cope with life and realize I have to work with raster instead of vector is not a good feeling. I'm following ninjamuffin's tutorial on importing art from Flash to Flixel and still have all kinds of issues with getting stuff to render properly. Having to jack up point size for text then scale it down to get something that resembles vector or high resolution text is annoying, but again, I'm still learning and there is probably a better way to do this (I hope).

I have some other nit picky things but I think these points are the most glaring and important to bring up.

My final note here is something a bit more general about programming and not engine specific. I, as with most programmers suffer pretty deeply with imposter syndrome. Math was easily my weakest subject in high school and I've spent my early adult life here avoiding it until now. I am really determined to become a game developer, and I really enjoy programming but unfortunately game development is probably one of the most math heavy areas of programming, so my lack of math ability is something I am struggling but will eventually have to overcome. I've spent a good chunk of time looking for resources and guides telling exactly what math I should focus on learning, but can never find any concrete answer. I'm hopeful I will be able to overcome this massive hurdle as I find it completely halts me from being able to do what I actually want in game programming.

Here's to hoping I can get our next game done before 2023!