It’s been a few years since I worked on any dev work outside of my day job. I lost interest in making my point and click adventure game because the engine cocos2d-x that I had originally been using, removed xbox support because they didn’t want to support it, then eventually the c++ version went out of support, in favor of a GUI version of the engine much more like Unity. I’ve played around with things like Adventure Creator for Unity, and some other engines but I really don’t want to learn to use those types of engines because that is more scripting and I want to get into the gritty of programming. I always feel way over my head with those engines too. I restarted the game framework many times and gave up each time after getting burned out on it.

I later found that cocos2d-x had been branched and renamed to Axmol http://axmol.dev Even better, they added back in UWP apps, so that means Xbox is once again an option with it. In addition I believe with Axmol, if I want to port to Nintendo eventually, it’s possible, with a lot of manual changing of the rendering code. From my understanding, on Nintendo’s developer forums, there is info on how to do so, but it is under NDA.

Recently I decided to start over one last time in C++ and Lua scripting. I decided to go a different approach and found ways to really simplify my old code for creating walk boxes and pathfinding. It works so much better too. I am also using a built in library, imGUI for making windows and text boxes etc which makes things a lot easier. So I am happy to say that after about a month, I am much further along than I had ever been with this project. I am close to having a working prototype that can move between rooms, but character movement, basic inventory control, and verb commands are all working in this prototype. The thing I’m really happy about is that the path finding code now can use far fewer polygons and it is way quicker to create them.

During Thimbleweed Park’s development, I had read and paid very close attention to how Ron Gilbert did things via his devlog. Later when he released the open source project Delores, which used the same game engine, I got even more insider information. I am taking a lot of influence from what he did with his “Wimpy” tool to build out levels. Though for now I am building the editor directly in my game. Once I get the game to a pretty good spot where I won’t need to add much more code to the editor, I’ll branch the project and remove all the editor code so that the finished game won’t have that code. It might not be the best way, but I don’t want to update two code bases until I get much further into the development.

That being said, I have not decided on a game name yet, and the story is still being worked on. For now I’m referring to this project as codename “Ariel”.

Below is video showing a bit how the tool looks, and the prototype in action.