You can remember that there was a vibrant community of Flash game developers before the demise of Flash (EOL December 2020, the date of its “demise” is debatable). There’s not really a replacement for Flash and the community kind of fragmented.<p>That said, my impression is that a big chunk of talent from the Flash community went to work on HaXe. These are people who make games and want tools to make game development easier—as opposed to people who get excited about engines, architectural patterns, and programming languages. Just as a general impression, based on people I’ve recognized working with HaXe.
I've written a couple side project games in Heaps and I'm a big fan.<p>If you're familiar with Pixi.js, Heaps and it's language, Haxe, will feel very similar. Haxe is a pretty cool language, it's similar to TypeScript but compiles to native binaries for almost all major game consoles.<p>Heaps was apparently the framework behind Dead Cells if that says anything about the level of polish you can accomplish with this set of tools.
I really wish Haxe would just take off in the application development world, it had so much potential to be what Typescript has become with the benefit of transpiling to different languages. We theoretically could have had 1 single programming language for a full application with JS front end, Django server, C++ workers, the best of all worlds.
If you are new to the Haxe or game development world I would advise against Heaps as the documentation is pretty bare bones. Haxeflixel [0] is one that is prominently recommended for good reason. Heaps is still great regardless and I have used it for a few private projects.
[0] <a href="https://haxeflixel.com/" rel="nofollow">https://haxeflixel.com/</a>
What are some advantages of Heaps over Godot or Unity? Neither Godot nor Unity are mentioned on Heaps' website, though there are some mentions in Heaps' community forums.
The idea of world generation being this easy in a game engine is cool. I can't wait to play around with it! Thanks for sharing this.<p><a href="https://heaps.io/samples/world.html" rel="nofollow">https://heaps.io/samples/world.html</a><p>Edit: spelling
I first discovered Haxe nearly a decade ago when seeking alternatives to Microsoft XNA. It was extremely influential in my learning programming. Lots of half-finished games and projects. Haxe is dear to my heart, but I haven’t touched it in a while. A couple of opinions:<p>- Haxe is held back by not being self-hosted [0].<p>- TypeScript is the ideal syntax for Haxe.<p>0: <a href="https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe/issues/6843" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe/issues/6843</a>
I love "Dead Cells". I clocked about 500hs on it since I bought it in 2018. It's a masterpiece. It is built with Haxe.<p>But on the 2014 MBP with Intel Iris graphics that I travel with it doesn't always run smooth. It may stutter in certain biomes and just plan hang for a few seconds sometimes (GC?).<p>For me, growing up as a teenager, learning assembly after C, so I can do 2D graphics on my VGA card, this is unacceptable for a pixel graphics game coming out today (even with the shader-based the effects it sports).<p>And I am certain this game would run smooth as f... on my laptop if it was written in something like Rust or Zig.<p>I understand that these were no really choices available when R&D on the game started and that C++ may likely have been out of the question too because of the burden on the devs that comes with than language. I.e. Haxe was likey a good idea given the constraints of the studio at the time.<p>But today, IMHO something like Rust+Bevy is a better choice for a game like this.
Just found two minor bugs in the "world" sample.<p>1: it doesn't detect the LMB release outside of the frame, although it keeps changing the visuals if I pressed it within the frame. If I release it outside of the frame, it will need a further press-release cycle to free the mouse pointer. It might be intentional but could be annoying sometimes.<p>2: the snow fall appears linked to the terrain position in a strange way: hard to describe in my non native English; if you move the terrain around while looking at the snow flakes you get it.
I had not heard much about HaXe before.
Given my current experiments in OCaml it was interesting
to learn its importance its development.<p>I am curious how large the community is?<p>Nicolas Cannasse having created (and still creating) HaXe
(Which would seem like more of a workload in itself)
He then goes on to write a 2D/3D game engine?<p>Both achievements seem huge on their own.<p>Not knowing the history, he seems to be an incredibly productive person?
Under the title "2D and 3D accelerated graphics" on the linked website it shows gameplay for Darksburg (top-left) and Northgard (both on the middle row). I've played both of these games for a decent amount of time (~150 hours between both) and can attest to how fun I found them. Darksburg suffers from lack of content but as functional games (no bugs etc) it was a pleasant experience.<p>So it appears Shiro Games use it!