So why did we choose Haxe and HaxeFlixel as our engine for Waking Up Eric Cloud
1- It's open source
I confess I'm an open-source enthusiast. This has got more to do with its functionality than anything else. The code being open source means I can fix bugs myself, and even contribute code to it instead of reporting bugs and waiting for a proprietary engine's team to fix it.
2- It has a very active community
If you've ever used a piece of code and got stuck using it and could not find a single person to ask about what you're doing wrong, then you will understand what I mean. Community is very important. You can have instant answers to questions you would spend weeks to figure out on your own. Tutorials and documentation are also much better when you have a big community.
3- It's cross-platform
HaxeFlixel supports all the desktop and mobile platforms that matter. I see in the forums that there are even people porting games to consoles. "Write once, run everywhere" is as easy as it gets with Haxe.
4- You can develop in Linux
Being able to develop in Linux is especially important for me since I am an open source enthusiast. This directly rules out Unity 3D as I would be stuck with Mac or Windows for running the editor. I'm simply more productive on my Gnome desktop than on any other platform.
5- No visual editing, no constraints
Engines like Godot have visual scene editors. This is good if you want to prototype things really fast, but when it comes to real games you're always doing something a little bit different than what the engine was built for. If this is the case, you have to learn the engine really well to get it to do what you need for it to do. This can be quite time consuming, and in some cases not even possible. Eventhough HaxeFlixel is a game engine (minus the tools), and not a framework, it also has some constraints on how you can program, but is much more lenient than the likes of Godot.
6- It has lots of libraries to choose from
Haxe has tons of libraries to choose from. Flash is dying and OpenFL is rising. There is a huge shift of AS3/Flash people coming over to Haxe/OpenFL side. We see more and more libraries ported from AS3 to Haxe everyday.
The downsides
1- The language
I don't particularly like Haxe. Coming from a C background, C++/Java style object orientation always bothers me. I'm not saying it's not good, it's just not my taste. I would be much more happy with a language Like Go. Simple and elegant. It doesn't try to be everything at the same time. I'm also not a fan of inheritance, because it can get very complicated to read and maintain code as the classes inherit from here and there. However, the libraries (especially the gaming related ones) make up for the aforementioned negative aspects of the language.
2- Lack of tools (IDE etc..)
Haxe doesn't have a good IDE on Linux platform. For Windows there is FlahsDevelop, but I think even FlahsDevelop lacks the debugging ability for the "hxcpp" target. I would really like to have an IDE with syntax highlighting and a good debugger. For now I'm making do with a text editor, a terminal and HaxeFlixel's debugging features.
Here is a small rundown of pros and cons for us. I will have more updates on this as I get more experienced with both the language and the library.
