Our game was simple – you control a little guy, mine up some ores, and then buy explosives and other things from the shop. It didn’t really have any challenge or objective, which a lot of people noticed.

I decided to remake it. I originally programmed it in Haxe, using HaxePunk. I’ve decided that I like HaxeFlixel better, so I’ve started working on a newer version. But I think that the biggest change will be the lighting. In the original game, there was a circle of light around the character, and darkness everywhere else. I did that by drawing an image around the player and filling everywhere else with rectangles. That was really bad. It only really works for one light, so I couldn’t implement torches.

I’ve decided to get a little bit adventurous with the lighting for the remake, and it works a lot better. I can have multiple lights, they blend nicely, and they can even be different colors! How did I do it, though? It’s actually pretty simple, compared to how complicated I thought it was going to be. I made a BitmapData, filled it with transparency, draw circles with a radial gradient, and used BitmapData.merge to merge it into the FlxCamera’s buffer. Onlything is, it’s a bit slow sometimes. Gonna have to figure out how to optimize it

The new version will have lava, water, enemies, more items, more minerals, more game modes, pretty much more everything. I’m looking forward to playing it, which is a good sign that I might actually get pretty close to finishing it or actually finish it.

I guess I’ll find out =]