Rebuilding Demon’s Hex In Haxe And Achieving Goals

zacharyMar 2, 2013

The new year brought with it a change in technology. We had been working on building our games for Flash using Actionscript 3 and Flixel. That is a very powerful pair of techologies to work with, if you want to target the web almost exclusively. However, our goals are to eventually target desktop environments as well as mobile phones. While it is possible to work with Actionscript to target those environments, it would require us to use something like Adobe Air. However, that technology is not particularly liked nor does it have continued support for Linux. So we needed a change.

Lucky for us, some awesome game developers ported Flixel to a very Actionscript like language called Haxe. HaxeFlixel has made it possible for us to fairly easily port our existing code, which honestly wasn’t a whole lot, and get ready to target all the technologies that Haxe targets.

By using HaxeFlixel, we will be able to create the types of games we want to make and bring those games to the web, desktops and mobile devicess.

This brings me to� our goals. Development has been slow, very slow, too slow. This is primarily because I work full time and have a family so the time I get to work on the game is not a lot. With all that in mind, Willis and I got together to lay out some realistic prospects for what I can do. I have broken out my tasks into monthly goals and plan on working them. Here they are for you:

February
- Finalize the Haxe Project for Demon’s Hex
- Set up the Title Screen
- Set up the initial Map Screen
March
- Get the Tokens Figured Out
- Get the Inventory Screen Working
April
- Get Battles Working
- Create the AI
May
- Create Story Elements and Progression

I have completed February’s goals and look forward to tackling March’s. I already have some great ideas on how to tackle some of the problems I had been facing previously when it comes to the tokens. A lot of that will be done outside of Haxe, though, as I will be creating some game tools for us to use.

As for Willis, his portion of Demon’s Hex is mostly completed and at this point he is working on things for it on an as needed basis. So he will be working on expanding his craft and learning to better utilize some tools that we plan to use on our next game. A lot of this is animation. I look forward to seeing what he does in that regard and plan to show them off when I can.