Progress, April 2019

I was hoping that I would be able to test Galapagos for Ludum Dare 44 this weekend, but I ended up working with a great team at Noisebridge instead, and made a game about Ares delivering wine to Dionysus.

Regarding the status of the project, my revised graphics model is more-or-less at a proof-of-concept of all the features(I missed feeling confident enough about it for LD by a few days), and the focus of development is shifting back towards end-user experience again, and refactoring my graphics demo from a hardcoded system interacting directly with the framework into something driven entirely by WebAssembly code and the Galapagos memory map.

While seeing if I could make it in time for LD I revised my consideration of which languages to focus on for WASM support and am going to experiment a little bit more. AssemblyScript, my first option, is at a pretty early stage of development and the compiler/documentation situation isn't the most helpful in terms of errors - which is making me look elsewhere again. Rust is attractive in terms of its level of development as a WASM target, user-friendly compiler and runtime performance characteristics, but the language restrictions lack in fluidity for prototyping and experimenting. I am going to try TinyGo next - Go is what I'm using for the emulator runtime already, and TinyGo is an embedded variant which can output tiny WASM binaries, which sounds promising.

My next milestone will be in late May, and I think I will be able to make a good release then.