After many months I decided to return to Monkey X.
The idea to make a (simple) game for mobile is still here… I love BlitzMax (I can’t stay without it), but after playing some small games created by MonkeyX (and BlitzMax too) users… I have the temptation to retry it!
So I restarted TED editor… oouch.. I didn’t feel at home to be honest! Yes, it’s very similar to the first MaxIDE edition… but it’s so … strange!
Syntax in MonkeyX is case sensitive (damn Mark!!!!!!) so testing old (and ugly) code was a little nightmare; there’s still no real debug info about error (just an info about error in line XX in HTML5 – the default target I use to test).
Because HTML5? Because it’s immediate. It starts the own little monkey-server (needed to bypass the HTML security requests) and voilà your app is running in a browser.
Of course the speed depends by the browser, but nowadays Chrome and Firefox are quite similar from this point of view.
After playing with my old source code (I found 2 little demo I created – 2011 !!! – to test some game ideas…) I tried to type something.
I rediscovered Maps (In BlitzMax this is immediate, in Monkey you need to ‘define’ what type to key & value you want… of course once you have this information everything is better…)
Other little play with arrays (arg!…) and some screen scrolling: it seems to work (a little flickering maybe, but for a quick test I feel very happy of the results).
BTW I decided to design and develop a very small game: basic graphics (I don’t want to spend money or time on it) and simple and immediate game logic. I have some little ideas… just to choose what follow.
Main target will be for sure HTML5 (and FLASH as I have already installed the SDK). And of course Android.
As I don’t own an Apple device (and relative ecosystem…) neither an WinPhone… only Android (and derivates) could have the joy to play my great game (ahahahah).
I will post my efforts here. I give myself an ETA (otherwise in 2024 we are still here waiting…): END OF SEPTEMBER 2014 (put it on calendar!)
And of course I would try to ‘monetize’ it in some way (just to know how to do it on a browser…)
