Post by abhimonk in Upsy-Downsy comments

Viewing post in Upsy-Downsy comments

Just stopping by again because I just found out: You made this with a custom engine? That’s sick!

I feel like I’ve been slowly trending away from big engines over the years and have been wanting to eventually try making my own. How long have you been rolling your own tech? Are all of your other itch games made with the same custom engine? Was porting to the web simple (i.e just call emscripten? or do you have a lot of web-only code)? I’m guessing your custom engine is backed by SDL (correct me if I’m wrong) but are you using any other libraries? (last question): Are you using pure C for game logic, or do you hook in with a scripting language too (i.e Lua)?

Sorry for the question spam, no pressure to answer. This is just a topic I’ve been interested in for a while, and I’m always really impressed when I see people actually shipping games with custom tech.

aksommerville27 days ago(+1)

All my games here use custom engines, but Upsy-Downsy is the first using Pebble. And will probably be the last too; I’ve decided I don’t quite like it, and I’m planning the next one.

(also, if you’re curious, a lot of my pre-Itch games are on https://aksommerville.com/ , with even more custom low-level fun!)

Nothing here uses Emscripten or SDL. I try hard to use the absolute minimum of dependencies, usually only platform I/O drivers (eg ALSA, X11, PulseAudio…), and of course on the Web there’s none of that :)

No scripting languages either. My feeling there is if you want the convenience of an interpretted language, we already get Javascript for free, so use that. Too Heavy is in Javascript. Cool thing about Wasm though, it doesn’t have to be C at the source. C++, Rust, Zig, Go… in theory they should all work. Maybe I’ll dust off my 1980’s Pascal skills someday and write a web game in that ;)

The easiest thing is to write in Javascript, and then the only homemade thing you need is the bundling logic. Or just use Webpack or whatever. Standard browser APIs really do all the work for you. TBH I’m not even sure what the high-level frameworks are for, when targetting web!

abhimonk27 days ago (1 edit)

Honestly, crazy but cool to go purely with platform-specific APIs. It makes sense that the web would be the easiest to target outside of that, with JavaScript and web apis being cross-platform. I had a brief stint where I tried to ship a game with pure JavaScript but got frustrated with non-web bundling options (I didn’t want to use Electron to make a downloadable build, didn’t see a lot of other good options other than basically shipping a web browser with my game).

Thanks a ton for the response! I might check out some of your other games, thanks for the link!

itch.io

Viewing post in Upsy-Downsy comments