I’ve come to the conclusion that I simply can’t stand in using a tool hiding what’s happening under the hood (despite being light ad unobtrusive such as Godot) without having to possibility to bend what I don’t like to my own purposes. Also, I don’t like the feeling I’m writing code for a scripting language I probably won’t reuse at all, being a engine-tailored DSL.
So, I’ve been tinkering with Corona SDK which appears quite interesting to me and it uses Lua which I’m comfortable with. Also, the framework is very well documented and supported. However, I’m still debated in going back and use Love2D that happens to have a simpler (i.e. less abstracted) API… and I like using the basic bricks just how I like.
To be honest, I’m courious in trying a different framework. That’s the main reason I’m switching from Love2D (whose, in my opinion, juvenile community feels me a bit unconfrortable).
I’m not a professionally skilled pixel-artist so I though of methods to skip some corners and reach a decent and acceptable productivity level. Eventually the choice fell into using rotoscope, whose artistically distinctive style I like very much (also, it’s the grounding technique in some of the games that I love the most… such as Karateka, Prince of Persia, and Flashback). As an further simplification, I pla to draw actors silhouette-like (with very few colors).
Speaking of colors, I’ve spent quite a while in deciding how to handle this subject. I wanted to adopt a palette with a limited amount of colors, and there a quite a lot of standard ones. Among the many, PICO8 has what I feel is the most vibrant and distinctive (reminds me of the Armstrad CPC palette, which I liked very much in the Eighties). Paired with the use of silhouettes it should give good results.
Please note that won’t mean I’m not going to use shades of that base colors, especially in special effects and fragment shaders.
In the meanwhile, I’m fiddling with a minor project that has always been a dream of mine to implement. That is a Pole Position inspired racing game. A very simple one, in the league of the original Atari game. This will be most likely the subject of the next devlog entry. :)