Oh tools.. How I don’t like any of them.

Holochrist development more or less froze when I came to realize that UDK is just way to clunky. Just importing an asset was nightmarishly clunky. I couldn’t bare with it. Then I turned to unity. I have to say I like it but it still doesn’t feel right to use these kind of tools to me. I’m a homebrew sort of guy.

So the last few days a crazy idea sparkled inside my tiny brain. What if I make the game a WebGL game!? After getting a canvas and everything set up. Sense started to return to my head..

Okay so graphically I can do it no doubt. But Holochrist is a horror game, getting good audio for an HTML5 WebGL game would be a real pain in the arse. Sure you can have sound playing, but you would be dealing with great latency and having the sound be 3d would probably be hell too. Also how the hell would I be able to handle the bandwidth? I’d have to make the game cost like $20 or something, but nobody would buy it then, and it isn’t worth that much. I plan for it to clock in at around  one or two hours (because I have to hire a voice actor for this game and can’t afford it to be long, also then I can make the game perfectly focused).

So no Web based horror game at this time. It would be nice, and fitting due to the shortness of the experience.

I know I’m going to homebrew the engine at least. Now I just need to decide on what language to use.

I am making the level editor with LWJGL and TWL with Java. I should be able to make it export into something that I should be able to import to any language, the fact that it is Java doesn’t matter.

In reality, it comes down to C++ versus Java for me. The main reason to use Java is that LWJGL is easy to set up and comes with everything I need in one library, on the flipside; it requires you to install a runtime environment and I don’t like forcing someone to do that. With C++, I’ve got everything I need. It is just harder to set up. Probably because I don’t know how to. But really, that doesn’t really matter. The code is what would be a bit more tricky. I should be able to manage it if I use Clang(++) because it is a fucking babysitter. And there’s always help from IRC and all that stuff.

Plus, I’ve got a fucking superbible by my side.

The portability of C/C++ is unmatched also. With Java, I reach out to the main platforms I want to reach, but if I want to port it further, my hands are tied. Eventually I’d probably want to support Haiku for example (although that will be a while, we still need to get Hardware Accelerated OpenGL stuff over there).

It just appeals to me when something runs natively, playing a game written in flash outside (and inside) a browser just feels plain wrong. And to be honest, using Java is even more wrong with this in mind.

Should I use C++?

Or maybe just plain C.

Expect the horrifying.