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! Good idea about the tech choices of Codecks. Maybe that would make for another good blog post.

I was actually confusing Maschinen-Mensch and Codecks and thought Codecks were the creators of Curious Expedition, but it would all be quite interesting!

I only used Google's Closure Tools for optimizing and obfuscating the code. Should probably add that to the post. Thanks

Thanks for the tips! Will check out them out.

Thank you! I think the main inspiration for the logo gradient was actually the Indiana Jones logo :)

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!

I LOVE the Curious Expedition, and my jaw dropped - literally - when I learned it was an HTML5 game.

From the perspective of someone who absolutely adores the mood and style and gameplay, I see the Ligne Claire work you're doing and it's absolutely beautiful. The art in CE2 is beautiful.

If I may offer an entitled little little nugget of feedback: As I experience it, the "breathing" style of animation feels a little jarring. Maybe when coupled with Ligne Claire especially. I'm referring to the "flexing" cutout animation (time-interpolated affine transformation / skeleton deformation of a set of shapes per entity). I'd like to request an in-game option to disable it :) Or actually, ideally to slow entity motion down to subliminal speed while maintaining motion speed of lights. Ligne Claire adventures are a big part of my nostalgia and my unconscious expectation would be of a more frozen, nostalgic, disconnected, dreamlike life on screen.

Mostly I feel shame to be saying this though and feel like there's no way to say this and also deliver the amazing amount of respect and love for your work.

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 gracious and, well, amazing reply! I still feel somewhat horrible for making such an "instructive" comment and feel like I have crashed into a beautiful thing and put my ignorant and greasy little fingerprints where they have earned no right to be. But it's such an interesting subject :) I hope I have been able to express the deep respect I hold for what you're doing. — I'll certainly be watching and cheering on the game's development! And will be preordering immediately when that's possible.

My criticism is a testament to how good the pixel art is in CE1. My son and I love your game so I'll be buying the sequel, but I feel like you are going more towards the Renowned Explorers visuals which I felt was completely inferior to CE. That said, I looked at the new art and it is pretty awesome, I just have to get over it.

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? :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fD5IJrZrJE

That's great, not sure how I missed this video since I follow you guys on Youtube.

It looks great and you pull it off nicely! It immediately reminded me of Tintin.

Thanks! The character/location illustrations are drawn by Garen Ewing. He is amazing.

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.

Well, you don't have to ship a whole browser. You can use the player's. Just do the moral equivalent of

    cd www
    python -m http.server &
    xdg-open http://0.0.0.0:8000

That's how I play RPG Maker MV games.

Then you'll get a flood of support tickets from people whose default browser doesn't run the game quite right. People downloading a game on Steam couldn't care less if it weighs an extra 100MB because it includes a copy of Chromium.

If you are, as the GP said, also distributing it as a web version so people can play it in their normal browser, you already have that problem.

Once you are charging money for the game on a distribution network, you probably aren't providing the full game on a standalone site anymore. Maybe you have a small demo.

Hell, doesn't Steam ship with Chromium (or at least Webkit)? I wonder if it's possible to piggyback on that somehow?

If you did that, any Steam update could break your game.

That's already a possibility if you're using Steamworks (which most Steam games - or at least nearly all I've played - are). Granted, the breakages from a Steamworks-related update are likely far less critical (unless your game critically depends on achievements, cloud saves, instant screenshots, or the Steam Overlay, which would be weird), but it ain't like this would be entirely unprecedented.

Breakage is also already a possibility for games with Linux ports that rely on the Steam-provided runtime environment (I don't know if this applies to Windows or macOS, since I haven't used the former with Steam in years, and haven't used the latter with Steam ever).

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.

Thanks! We made extensive use of Canvas caching and only redrawing if things changed.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/...

Whenever I try to use Canvas caching I run into an issue I don't yet fully understand that causes my images to come out of cache blocky and terrible looking. Something about a max canvas size? I don't quite get it. Happens whenever I use fabric.js caching.

I'm guessing that means you rolled your own canvas API code, rather than using a library like PixiJS. Is that something you'd consider open-sourcing, or is it so tightly integrated with game-specific logic that it wouldn't make sense?

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.

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.