I've been working for years on a game that would be a mix between Dwarf Fortress, Factorio and SpaceChem.

Problem is, I keep switching between engines and languages, never making too much progress. I've written several isometric rendering libraries, tried out going fully 2D ASCII or fully 3D in unity... And then something else eats up my time for a while again.

relatable

Sounds neat though. I've always wanted to have a go at a simple 2d isometric game myself. I just keep "looking at" my options for rendering and can't find a solution I'm willing to invest in.

I'm not stoked about diving into a big elaborate complete solution like unity since I'm specifically wanting to handle some of the rendering myself - just for curiosity's sake.

I've dabbled a bit in SDL in c++ which seemed neat, but do you (or anyone else) have any experience with other alternatives?

@ltlian I started out in pygame, then Haskell + ncurses, and currently trying out both a JS/webgl and Rust/opengl approach.

@bittersweet INTERESTING. can i join? 👌

@wowotek yes you can join but please add indexes & foreign key constraints on your tables.

@wowotek serious answer: There's not much to join, as I've scrapped and restarted 20 times and still basically have to start from scratch.

I'll play the fuck out of that once it goes EA, but I got my own project, so I can't join the team.

Yo, if you get ANYTHING playable done, I'll be all over that thing.

I use libgdx for developing a hobby game. It's cool because it strikes the balance between a full fledged engine like unity and writing stuff from scratch. its also cross platform so you can potentially run your game on mobile, desktop and the web.

@bittersweet literally from scratch do you even have a repo for that?

@wowotek I don't just have one repo, I have a graveyard of repos, with thick layers of dust on it, spread out over github, bitbucket, gitlab, private servers, and even a few unpushed git dirs on old laptops and encrypted drives I forgot the passkeys for.

@bittersweet ok then i'll try something to settle on and then inform you about it.

It is really great idea. I want to know it more

I've had an itch to make something similar for ages, my issue is that I don't:

A. Know the first thing about game dev

B. Know the first thing about any of the mathematics involved

C. Do art, like, at all, you'd cry if I did.

D. Have the motivation to even work on the smallest of personal projects, let alone a game.

*sigh*

@bittersweet sounds like an awesome game. Quick suggestion: don’t use python... Python is great but maybe not for game dev.
Second suggestion: just start with something! Keep it simple, don’t get too bogged down with the various technicalities. What matters is the game - not the other crap.
Good luck and I can’t wait to play it!