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Comment by amourgh | Hacker News Reader

Looks pretty.What tools you used to develop it?

I like the fact that the visual and musical aesthetic forced on early game designers by hardware limitations is now a desirable attribute in a new game. From the video the game looks and sounds great... In fact, I just bought it! Will report on my experience with the Linux version.

I don't know anyone under that age of 30, do the kids like the "8-bit" thing as well? :)

edit The Linux version is an Adobe Air package. Will try it out later.

17 years old and I can confirm this is indeed 'the business'[1], the retro aesthetic appeals to a lot of the younger demographic simply as a stylistic choice rather than a throwback to our youths. Limitation breeds innovation and as a result many games utilising 8-bit inspired graphics tend to have really unique art direction.

[1]: A phrase I may have just invented but plan to use frequently from this point on.

My nephews (9, 12 & 13) love it, but maybe they're just being nice :)

Are 9, 12 and 13 year olds capable of being nice when they aren't genuinely feeling it?

HaXe mostly.

Wait, so can you now generate JS, Flash and C++ versiond of the game automatically (or, at least, easily?).

Kinda easily...It requires some extra code.

Could you go into a bit more details? I'd find it very interesting to hear about a fresh real-world experience with converting a HaXe game to another platform.

Are there many places where the same code should work but, for some reason, doesn't? Or have you knowingly made some parts of the code platform dependent, and simply need to port/independentize them?

For example some of the flash API is still missing from NME (a lib for the c++ target) & the performance (and more importantly bottlenecks) is quite different on different targets.

Not to mention all the browser limitations you have to work around if you use JS...

Still, very nice! How did you like the language?

Pretty good! It's like AS3 but with a bunch of stuff added and some of the rough edges polished.

HaXe seems to be a fine idea indeed. What is your experience working with it in practice?

Really, really good.

I've made the prototype in js and it was a ton easier and worked better with haxe.

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