I released last Sunday the demo to my upcoming game #8-bitBot, a programming puzzlegame, on itch, running in browser: bsky.app/profile/zet2...

#cozygame #puzzlegame #programminggame

Well done, it looks really good 👍

Why do they look so tasty?!?

And how did you render those?

Brilliant idea 😂

Now I am tempted to make bot skins - but I have some more important tasks to do for the moment 🥲

I am more thinking about how to have a version that increments automatically. Like when triggering a Web build or a desktop build, that it increments a number in a file. Nothing big, just something that helps me identifying the last build/version quickly...

Yeah, it needs polishing. I got a bit distracted by preparing the itch.io upload and fixing the safari url open issues. There's no end to stuff that needs to get done 🙃

The technical challenge to integrate such a library is in my view more complicated than the problem itself. I spent over an hour trying to do it the "right" way by using a standard format.
Yes, it gives more peace of mind to use an established well working library, but it isn't cost free either...

So I wrote a "deflate" tool that recurses into the data file, concatenates all the data into a single file with a header per file (filename + size), compress it and apply a trivial encryption on top of it.
100 lines of code.
The download/unpack is another 50 lines of code...
Half an hour of time.

Because: The ZIP format is (fairly) complex. But the problem I have is simply: Get an archive, unpack, continue starting up the game. All I need is to copy all files into a single file and compress it (raylib has deflate/inflate API functions). That's really simple!

There are, of course, a lot of libraries. And they tend to support a lot of things, but also come with dependencies. After a try to get a reasonable library to work and getting compiler errors, I was pausing and asking myself "What the hell am I doing here?! This is not that complicated".

My first thought was: Create a zip, download the zip, unpack it in my C code into the virtual file system and it is done.
Well. It seems unzipping files is not default included in raylib/emscripten.
So I started looking for libraries...

To keep a long story short: I decided to slim down my preloaded data directory (just the atlas with the logo) and downloading an additional archive from within the game.
What sounded simple became complicated for really weird reasons...

For context: Emscripten can "preload" data, that means the data folder is zipped and downloaded by the emscripten environment in browser before WASM starts.
So for bigger files / slower connections, this means not showing anything until it is ready... (unless writing JS code to do that).

That looks really cool! Great work!