Update after 4 months

It’s been about 4 months since the 7DRL that House of Limen was destined for, but failed to reach in time. I’ve since continued with development.

For some, COVID-19 has given people more time to devote to hobbies. For me, I’ve been far busier, so I’ve been doing gamedev where I can.

Since then I’ve managed to get the portal system working, improve maps, and improve the UI. I was close to finishing the engine and get stuck into the game itself, but ran up against some aesthetic and performance issues. More and more I was fighting my main library bearlibterminal, which is a great but perhaps underdocumented library. As I pushed more and more on the UI side of things, I managed to break it whilst trying to get differently-sized fonts working.

At the same time I’ve been learning Rust, which is trickier than Python but the performance is amazing. After a brief exploration into libraries, I found that ggez was nice to program with and covered most of the things I cared about. I’m currently a few weeks into a rewrite from scratch in Rust and it’s going well.

This move allows me to easily take care of some outstanding issues from the previous version: audio, fonts, graphics, UI styling and capability, gamepads, cross-platform packaging, and sheer performance. Some of the code structure from the Python version can carry over, but some can’t.

Although its apples-to-oranges, I’m 621 lines of code in Rust, versus the previous 2,561. I hope to be at least as capable as the Python version in about a month.

I’ll continue to update this page with progress and share pictures as soon as I can.