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1 step forward, but 15 steps back.

ForeLeft

After quite a bit of vibe coding I realised that the code was getting a bit out of hand. I didn't know what half of it was doing as I was blindly accepting changes by Windsurf, and it was also not running as fast as I would like. I spent some time looking into how best to develop the game and eventually settled on Odin + Raylib.

Why?

I wanted to get more low level as I'm mostly a TypeScript developer in my day job. I really liked the Odin syntax and the simplicity of Raylib (along with the performance it brings).

Progress

I have also been on holiday in the Philippines, so development work has been limited to a few hours each evening whilst getting ready for dinner, etc. Even so, I have been able to get the following working:

  • basic tilemap
  • renderer (with tile culling)
  • camera
  • very basic placement
  • along with learning Odin and Raylib.

Art Direction

Whilst on the plane to the Philippines I was thinking a lot about the art direction of the game. I started to play the game TheoTown on my iPad and really liked the simplicity of it. I also did a bit more investigation into some more art styles I like.

TheoTown

What's Next?

I need to look for or create a nice ui library, i think i might create my own that will follow the same pattern as flexbox to keep the UI side of things easy.

NOTE: It's running much faster now.