I've been trying this neat game engine called ebitengine. It's barebones compared to the likes of some of the large game engines like Unity, Unreal, or Godot in a sense that it doesn't give you any pre-built tools like physics and assets rendering (rendering images / sprites and animations). I chose it simply because it's in Go, a language I'm very familiar with.
I haven't tried any other game engines yet since I'm still not familiar with C and C++. I'm in the process of learning them (I'll also probably post a blog regarding my learnings soon). I'm eyeing to learn Raylib which mainly uses C and also Unity.
I've also been trying to create animations and sprites using Aseprite. You can see in the demo below that the spaceship and missiles have thruster animations which I'm proud to say I made them myself 😏.
I'm proud of the missile animation in particular since there's a "sonic boom" animation a split second after it's launched from the spaceship. It's 100% inaccurate since there's no air in space but I figured I'd add it since it looks neat and I've always wanted to animate that.
You'll be able to see the animations more clearly in my YouTube channel:
Lastly, I also tried Audacity to make the seamless audio loop for the missile thruster in the on mode (which is essentially when it's flying).
I'll be writing about the process so far, the challenges I faced, what I think of game development in general, and ebitengine specifically later.
That's what I have so far. The article is still WIP.
For now, feel free to try:
- Click the game window.
- Move around using W, A, S, D.
- Rotating using Q or E.
- Fire missiles using F.
To restart, click outside the game and refresh the page.
For the wide screen version, navigate here: