Progress on Archie
As you may know, Archie has not been actively developed in past 6 months, but that does not means it is cancelled. So what is going on about the project?
# Game Rewritten
The whole game has been rewritten to my new engine that does not rely on XNA technology. The engine is called Riateu which is made with MoonWorks a free cross-platform game development framework.
This allows me to have more control over to the graphics renderer and I could make more optimization with the renderer. The current state does not have a lighting system as of yet, but that is to be implemented soon in the development.
# Box Physics Improvements
The box physics are still the same as the old one, but there is an improvements made to it to make it more consistent. When player is pushing the box, the box no longer have an inconsistent push where sometimes it pushes too far from the player, causing an unpredictable behavior.
# Button Improvements
Buttons now interact like a solid. Boxes and Player can now step on the button. While it may sounds like an aesthetic change, it can also change some gameplay and may affect some smaller areas.
# Game Architecture
The rewrite now uses ECS (Entity Component System) with this library called MoonTools.ECS. May drop this depending on the stage of development.
It does gives some benefits like:
- Entities are more composable that it makes it easy to think more on the game rather than the whole system for your game.
- Does not need to keep track the reference, which means it is less of an error prone.
- Performant enough and predictable. What you write is what the entities will do.
It significantly improves the game elements, but in a cost of development time since it is hard to get used to this architecture.
[WORK IN PROGRESS BLOGS…]