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MSGhero
Free time is nice time.

Nick @MSGhero

Age 31, Male

Somewhere in the North

Joined on 12/15/10

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Heaps of code

Posted by MSGhero - May 5th, 2021


It's been about 10 years of making games as a hobby, and 99% of that has been Flash or Flash-adjacent. But no more.


I've posted a few times about using HaxeFlixel, and it's probably the best all-around code library I've seen. But man, I fought with it every step of the way to get what I wanted done. I think my earlier games, which were all top-down pixel art FF6 looking, would have been a breeze with Flixel. But when you stray from pixels or try to do something too complex, it can be a bare-knuckle brawl. I was moving away from its intended use, which isn't a bad thing at all.


After Quarantine (the game, because... yea), I decided to stop using Flixel and go back to OpenFL. Basically Flash AS3 for the modern coder. (Flixel is built on top of OpenFL, and you interact with it a fair bit, so I consider it to also be Flash-adjacent.) We did Newgrounds Snowboarding for Pico Day, which was super cool but also highlighted that I don't really like OpenFL either. The AS3 API, my dear and problematic friend of 10 years, was being more annoying than helpful at almost every level. Adobe even felt that way, back when they pretended to care about Flash (sigh).


Since I only code as a hobby, I don't need to put up with not enjoying it. Flixel is amazing for beginners and great within its chosen limitations. OpenFL is just AS3 minus Flash. Leaving OpenFL now ultimately means I'm leaving AS3, which.... yeah ok bye ✌🏽.


I'm trying out Heaps now, written by the same guy who made the Haxe language that all you FnF modders hate so much apparently. It's lower-level and has less goodies, but it's so much easier to put code together. The internals are implemented better than OpenFL's are, which I sorta don't care about but also do if that makes sense. It seems like actually finishing games is what allows me to make these judgements, so I'll post something to NG made with Heaps and see how I feel then.


So. Keep making games (or mods) with Flixel, if you want to. If not, explore the other Haxe libs and see which one you vibe with most. Then make a game! Rinse, repeat.


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Comments

heaps always seemed cool to me, one of these days I'll fuk around wit it. Nothin against flixel, I just wanna dabble around with the 3D stuff more than anything else lololol

I’m scared of 3D, but yeah this would be the place to do it

I'm also fed up with Flash but not really itching to learn anything new either.
Maybe Ruffle eventually getting AS3 support will rekindle my enthusiasm.
Or maybe I'll learn assembly and try finishing that NES game I started.

Think I saw a screenshot of that. Would be cool, but quite different coding experience I imagine

Personally, I think of Haxeflixel as a stepping stone from Unity to something like Phaser. But I’m loving it so far, and can see myself being pretty comfortable with it until I’m ready to push the bar more and need to move to something more freeing

That’s great! I wish it existed/I knew about it way back when, as my unstructured environment made me miserable tbh

@matt-likes-swords @MSGhero Yeah, I'd consider teaming up with a programmer so I can focus on art.

i'm a big fan of lower level stuff, so heaps has def intrigued me... if i ever decide to rly get into web & cross-platform focused stuff it's probably gonna be the first place i look to, alongside raylib

Kha is even lower level if you want to add that to the list

i guess i’m just out of touch these days, but i didn’t realize there was so much haxe hate out there :o

either way, good luck with heaps! once you get over the initial learning curve, it’s super intuitive to use and really lets you do whatever you want with it. just an example - i’m slowly building my own flixel-ish renderer for it, completely bypassing the regular scene graph. not sure if it’s a good idea, but heaps makes it easy to do anyways lol

Look up haxelflixel on twitter lol. It’s not that bad, more people hating coding than Haxe or mad that cpp builds require so much download

I hadn't heard of Heaps, it looks pretty neat! I also agree shipping something with an engine is the best way to judge it (so many details are easy to gloss over when prototyping).

Curious to see what you end up making with it!