After spending my weekend making a game, I figured it would be good to revisit the whole game maker app notion. I used Unity for the game jam, and I have to admit, the experience reminded me that Unity’s toolset is one of the best I’ve ever come across for forcing you to decompose functionality. It’s not the perfect software structuring methodology, but for games, where you may want very granular reuse of certain kinds of assets and behaviour, it can be close enough.
When I got a chance to reflect, I also took another look at TouchDevelop. And you know what? It’s kind of great. It’s overly simple-minded, and it’s code-focused, and it relies on cloud access for fast prototyping, and support libraries are kind of a non-starter, but for all that it’s still kind of awesome to develop a working piece of software directly on your device. It’s really not a far step from this technology to something that’s mind-blowingly powerful for the platform, and much closer to the gold standard.
Now I’m kind of interested to discover what else is out there.