Making engines is rough. Where do you even start? Most would point to something like Unity, Unreal, Godot, those are heavy hitters, they do everything except for your breakfast. But what is a game engine without a game? An endless spiral of torment and suffering? For sure!! That's why you make a game with the engine. 

But let's just say the road to Momopie's Maze has been rocky, moving from developing games with Godot to something of my own.

I originally intended for MM to release last year. It is now July 22nd. I am not proud of this by any means, but it's not like I could really predict where the project would head. You just have to go into a game expecting the long haul, or you'll faint after only a glimpse at the calendar. The engine thing doesn't help of course. Neither does my first year in college! Did I do well? Yes! But it certainly took time away from me, even as I did work on and off the game whenever bored on campus. Doing stuff is easy enough. What they don't tell you about is managing time. And there's just not enough time in the world.

Originally I meant to go with Lua as the scripting engine. However I soon became entranced by Tiny C Compiler. After all, being able to use C as a scripting language is kind of baller, no? It integrated very well, but it started showing its teeth over time. Turns out it's kind of hard to maintain having a whole C compiler inside your game engine. It also didn't mesh well as much as I had hoped with my dream of a game engine where everything, from scripts to shaders to textures, could reload in the blink of an eye, so you can develop a whole chunk of a game, or even an entire one, without even so much as closing and reopening the game window.

I also recently now made the tough decision to redo the engine from scratch, getting rid entirely of the dependency on Raylib with my own little win32 functions in place, using modern OpenGL to write a tiny 2D renderer that can quickly throw sprites everywhere, and reuse all other remaining work I had already done since I'm not THAT stupid. However the most important decision of all was returning in full force to using Lua. It just works, no? I've made games with it before, I hold a small amount of pride in using a language made in my own country, and best of all, I genuinely love writing it. It feels understandable, simple. I value that above all else in this engine, because I'd rather use things I love. 

Do I also happen to love having stuff run fast and take little space? Sure do!! But that doesn't mean I'm gonna write a Forth interpreter. It's a language with a simple implementation but very complex usage. A lot of programming is just thinking, and I'd rather not think too hard about the very primitives I need to craft to make the thing I want. Sorry Forth, you're just more interesting as something to implement than to use.

This new rewrite of Gunner Engine is wrapping up soon, and so development of this fansequel will pick back up. I've opened up the itch.io page as proof of my growing commitment to having something more proper soon. Not a lot of assets left to do, just a ton of programming work. 

I've overtime become heavily intertwined with this silly witch and hope this game can be fun for everyone. Thank you for your interest, and see you soon!