I tried YAML for another game prototype in the meantime. I like it as well but I feel the whitespace syntax can be very error prone if not all your team members come from a technical background and know about whitespace settings in the editor.
Thank you! We struggled a bit with coming up with a new interesting art style for CE2, but once we stumbled on art by Garen Ewing we knew we had something exciting for us.
Did you see our comparison with Renowned Explorers by the way? :)
Thanks so much! I appreciate it! The animation style that you suggest has come up in discussions before. We're still figuring out how to exactly deal with different scenarios where the diary text is much more detailed than what we can achieve in animation. That will be an interesting problem to tackle as we add more and more content to the game.
Thanks for the playing Curious Expedition! Sorry you're not feeling the new art style. It is based on Ligne Claire as popularized by Tintin. I hope once you see the whole game, we'll be able to win you over!
Yes, no helper libraries and I coded quite close to the metal.It's probably even a stretch to call it an engine. It's just built around the specific game mechanics. It wouldn't make sense to open source that part unfortunately.
When customers of a PC distribution platform spend money on your game they want to be able to own it by downloading it and having it live on their computer and work offline as well. For this you need to deliver them something that is completely packaged and contains everything to run the game.. so even if that means basically shipping a full browser with your HTML5 game.
We also have a web version which can be played online via the regular browser.
The implicit collection problem can be prevented by making sure that you put explicit return statements at function ends. This goes contrary to the dense syntax argument but at least there is a workaround for performance critical code.
Yes, CoffeeScript was quite hot back then - no pun intended. Even though its not as used anymore I think it pushed the development of JS itself forward.
Fun fact: there is a hacking forum that still have failed to create trainers for Curious Expedition due to "weirdly changing memory addresses". I think if they would have realized that it was just a browser game it would have been much easier for them.