Some of my more dedicated followers may know I dabble frequently in the dark arts of low level dev. Be it making C programs for image viewing, working with OpenGL, contributions to raylib, since the start I held a fascination for how games used to be done (and still are by some) and how I can do it today with better tools.

The thing is I move faster than game engines. Clickteam Fusion worked til I needed more. Unity worked til I needed better (please don't use Unity.). Godot works. But after Decimation Journey I am not sure you'd catch me using it.

I move faster than this engine and it shows. I tend to hit onto a lot of things I have to come into solutions for. Some of these are to be expected. Some others are just silly. The UI features are so utterly powerful but very bad to work with. It's like a swiss knife without instructions. You are prone to cutting yourself while learning how to handle it and it sure stings.

The 3d portion of Godot looks great but has a hideous workflow. Some things don't even work well. Model animations are utterly janky to edit.

Shaders are handled very well but little control of the rendering is exposed. You have to touch the internal source code for that and I am not interested is playing around with a monolithic level C++ codebase. Classes, virtual methods, that stuff is a tad nasty to me.

Why don't I do it myself if I'm such a smartass? Glad you asked, I did for 3 games previously and a game I'll finish after I put out the DeciJourney demo does use the raylib framework. I think I just faced scope and some skill issues then. Nowadays I can handle things like TACTILE.

After DeciJourney is fully released I'll be working on Jim's Challenge Remazed and it'll possibly use something of my own. I can't specify for sure what it'll use but I'll most likely be coding it with Zig. It's a language trying to be a better C and it solves many problems well. Cross platform just works. Async just works. Compiles C/C++ too. Literally better C.

There is the possibility I'll also just use Godot as usual. It is good for 2D after all. But it is only solving a lot of these problems on 4.0 and that won't come out any time soon, much less for web browsers. There still isn't much work out there for Zig games on the web browser but WebAssembly being a target of the language helps.

At some point I'll have to decide if these games are too big for the browser and maybe DeciJourney is the time to ask it. People already are having a little trouble running TACTILE on the browser and I explicitly had to downgrade the experience. I had to use a lower quality codec for the cutscenes and cutout entirely the Big Thing about the Secret Ending.

I think the demo will be the only DeciJourney release on Newgrounds, I'd hate immensely to downgrade the experience. I hope you understand. It'll let me move onto focusing on delivering a better native experience though.