EXiGY rolls up the all of the above experiences into a single package: make games the way they were made in the mid-90s, by dragging and dropping objects into a window, programming some behaviour into those objects, and clicking the Run button. It’s like ZZT with tile graphics instead of ASCII.
Want to send your little game to some friends? Click the Gift button to package all of the files up, and send your friend the .XGY file.
EXiGY is about making it fun to create games again.
↫ Chris on the Exigy website
I fell in love with this the second I saw it come by on Mastodon. Chris – I don’t know the author’s full name so I’ll stick with Chris – has been working on this for the past year, and it’s not out quite yet. Still, the feature list is packed, and on the linked website, they intend to post development updates so we can keep up with the goings-on. This seems like an incredibly cool project and I’d love to play around with it when Chris deems it ready for release.
While I like the concept, I see two problems with the site:
First, locking the height of a window within a window is very irritating… especially when I don’t like reading in such a short viewport.
Second, it needs to be more prominent that it’s not available yet and that the link to download isn’t just buried. As-is, it reads like something you can use now, written by someone who just isn’t very good at designing a site for navigability.
Also…
I’d appreciate more clarity here, because the overall description sounds more like they’re lumping Godot in with Unity as a 3D engine being pressed into a task it’s not suited to (Godot actually does have a dedicated 2D engine which uses pixels as the base unit) than that they’re faulting Godot’s workflow design and I’d like more detail on what aspects of Godot’s workflow are difficult for beginners.
I didn’t find making a default 2D scene (i.e. click “Run” and you’re dropped right into the only level) in Godot that much more difficult than my first dabbling with Borland Delphi a couple of years ago. (And I think that’s perfectly fair to Godot, given that entry-level Delphi UIs are completely mouse-driven and don’t need you to define gamepad/keyboard bindings.)
If anything, the biggest thing I struggled with in Godot before reading the tutorials was that, as a programmer and primarily having post-childhood experience with POSIX, GTK, Qt, wxWidgets, and SDL, I was in a cognitive rut about how a program is structured and I needed to read some docs to make that leap to how a Visual Basic/Delphi-style “you don’t write the main() function” architecture applies to something which isn’t a widget UI.
Beyond that, my only question is “Will it be under a DFSG-compliant open-source license? If so, I like the idea”.
RSS Readers are your friend. (and his RSS link is near the top right button)
I’m aware that an update which clarifies most of what I commented on has been posted since I wrote that.
Unless you think I should be one of those people who treats the YouTube subscribe button as a second Like button, I don’t see why you think the RSS feed would be relevant. Stuff like “will it be FLOSS?” is part of convincing me to subscribe, not something I’ll subscribe to get an answer to.
Maybe the answer is this :
What Game Developers can Learn from id Tech = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVF08VN5s2s&t=35m14s
Tilengine = https://github.com/megamarc?tab=repositories
WTF is a mastodon?
A mastodon is an extinct mammal similar in appearance to mammoths.
It is also a distributed p2p social network platfrom.
He asked “what is a mastodon?”, rather than “what is Mastadon?” – I assume he knows what Mastadon is.
Feels like fantasy consoles are dime in a dozen these days. Another one that does what Exigy is trying to achieve is BASIC8 and you can get it on Steam.
If I’ve found the right one, it says “Display: 160×128 pixels”.
What makes me hope EXiGY will be under a FLOSS license is that it’s not aiming to be an idealized form of some console that predates my nostalgia, but rather to be an idealized way to do what I’d characterize as the VESA Video BIOS era of DOS games. (640×480 to 1024×768, monochrome to 256 colors, Home-made non-Windows windowing environments, Isometric tiles… The description makes me think of games like Afterlife, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, SimCity 2000 for DOS, etc.)
(I already have a copy of PICO-8 from a long-ago Humble Bundle and I care more about people being able to hack on my creations without paying up-front than about it being easy.)
…though I will admit that, for my plans to expand my skills in the retro-hobby sphere, I’m a bit torn between jumping straight into Retro68, Free Pascal, and Open Watcom C/C++ or grabbing one of the various versions of CodeWarrior, Delphi, or Visual C++ off my shelf of collectables to learn with since that’s what the books cover.