In search of a platform

With this post, I will bring you up to speed.  My current dilemma is deciding what platform to develop the game on.  I have what appear to be conflicting goals for the platform that make it difficult to find one platform that is exactly what I want.  I have worked with SDL on other projects in the past.  I spent some time working with Slick for this project as well.  I even tried Qt.  My most recent foray has been with the HTML5 canvas element.  I have acquired experience and knowledge from working with each of these options, but also I have used up a bit of time with no product to show for it. My next goal on this project is to weigh my options and decide on a platform.

Most of my daily programming is in ruby.  I have spent time working with C/C++, Objective-C, Java, and many others.  One of the deciding factors for me will be what language I will use to program the game.  For my canvas trial, I used JavaScript, for Qt,  C++.  SDL is written in and most native in C but offers many bindings to other languages.  Slick is a library for Java.

I ruled out the HTML5 canvas option for several reasons.  Sound would be a problem and responsiveness was noticeably distracting to me.  I also noticed a occasional but semi-consistent lagging and the smoothness of the graphics rendering.  While it offered many great pro's, I don't believe that that platform is quite far enough along to use at this point for this game.  I will continue to watch this platform with interest.  For the curious, my father pointed me to a really neat project that aims to allow you to build desktop and mobile applications with web technologies and I had hoped to use it to make my game both downloadable and playable on a website.

I also ended up ruling out Qt.  The thing that I liked about Qt is that it had a nice GraphicsView widget that supports a view hierarchy and collision detection as well as the ability to be backed by OpenGL or software rendering depending on if OpenGL is available.  However, the framework must either be bundled or installed by the user and it is quite bulky and I would only be using a small portion of it.  I also had trouble styling the GUI to look like the original Asterax game.

In my next blog entry, I will go over what I see as my remaining available options and weigh them.