So previously I wrote about switching technologies from libGDX to Phaser. This worked fine for Square Next?, as it isn’t very performance intensive. But when prototyping a new idea, I ran into some problems.

Using Cordova was fine for iOS, but the only way I could get decent performance on Android was using CocoonJS. Not too bad, as CocoonJS was free, but they recently switched to a different pricing model (and a different name - Cocoon.io), i.e. one where you have to pay actual money. To be fair you can still have two projects for free, but anything more than that starts to get expensive (esp. for a hobby dev with no actual budget). Plus the workflow isn’t great, I don’t like having to wait on cloud compilers.

So, back to the drawing board.

Enter Haxe, or more specifically HaxeFlixel.

I’d briefly played with HaxeFlixel before, after moving on from Flash and ActionScript, but never finished anything. Plus the Haxe landscape is confusing, OpenFL, NME, Lime? I decided to give it another shot though, and a new install went fairly smoothly.

Enter The Giraffle

So, unbeknownst to you, gentle reader, I sneakily released a little something onto the Play Store when you weren’t looking.

It’s called Giraffle, and it came about after a totally random conversation. I made the inital Phaser version in a weekend, but then ran into the aforementioned performance issues. So, looked like a perfect candidate for a re-write with HaxeFlixel.

It went okay, the biggest problem was dealing with a different co-ordinate system.

The Android version was re-released with no noticeable difference to you, but a totally different technology stack. And I now have an iOS version to play with too.

So going forward I think I’ll be using HaxeFlixel, lets see how it goes.

In the meantime, go and have a play with Giraffle:

Many Thanks,

art