Development of Sokovania Is Back On and Will Be Streamed On Twitch

When I last left Sokovania, there were major problems I hadn't solved, most or all related to the fact that I developed the game in a custom C++ game engine. Firstly, I was worried about developing a level editor. It's a big undertaking for something that, while required, didn't seem much more effiecient than developing puzzlescript-like text files. This was further complicated by the need to save the game. A big feature I wanted for Sokovania was a persistent world, where solved puzzles would become part of bigger metapuzzles. The issue, though, was possibly saving over a failure state. Full Bore, for example, solved this by resetting most puzzles but saving progress made in reaching items or doors.  I couldn't see a way to do this at the time because I did not intend to differentiate a puzzle from the environment. Lastly there were some troublesome mechanics. Without spoiling anything, one of the extended mechanics in the game was really cool but made integrating new mechanics difficult.

With all of the above problems, I tried developing the game in the Godot game engine. (The reason I chose Godot is that owning the intellectual property of the game engine is very important to me.) Then, when that didn't go well, I made a solitaire game for the first time in two years which I released and tried my hand at an action game and a strategy game, which I did not release. While the design was pretty smooth, I found programming in the engine miserable. So I gave up.

After all of that headache, I went back to Sokovania a week ago with fresh eyes. Most of the problems I left were pretty much solved. I discovered Sean Barret's stb_tilemap_editor.h which is a simple, single file and easily-integratable tilemap editor. I've been playing games like Toki Tori 2+, Semblance and The Floor Is Jelly which use checkpoints, object-based rewind mechanics and single screen rooms, respectively, to prevent the player from getting stuck. And, with plenty of time to think, I (presently) ditched the troublesome mechanic. 

In conclusion, I am now developing Sokovania again. I recently finished porting the engine over from SDL 2 to Allegro 5, rewrote the block-pushing code and am now preparing the engine to integrate stb_tilemap_editor.h. I also just got a Twitch account and plan on streaming the development. If everything goes well, my first stream will be tomorrow, August 10th, 2019, at 1:00 PM (13:00) EDT at twitch.tv/*****. 0Hope to see you there!