Yes. That's right.
It took me TWO YEARS to finish the web version of this game !
I spent a lot of time trying to get the html5 target of UE4 to work, but in the end I had to give up. The devs from Unreal admitted that there were some bugs in the source code, and that unfortunately for me, they were not a priority.
After a lot of reading and thinking, and yelling inside my head, I ended up with
HaxeFlixel.
HaxeFlixel is a well-known game library based on
Haxe. And Haxe is an Actionscript-like language that
can be compiled to many different targets : Flash, html5, Windows exe, Android, etc.
I rewrote about half of the game in HaxeFlixel before I was ready to admit to myself
that I didn't enjoy working with it.
And then of course, there was the 'unofficial' burnout that lasted a year, followed six months later by an 'official' burnout and ASD diagnosis.
In between all that, I managed to migrate my code to
OpenFL, another Haxe-based game library.
This library is smaller, which means that some things have not been implemented. But
of course there are plugins, or you can do what I did : write the code from scratch.
I'm actually quite fond of OpenFL. The community is great, and Joshua Granick alias 'singmajesty'
seems to be glued to his computer screen (many thanks for all the help !).
I also reworked the game a bit, because most people told me that it was too difficult.
I added visual feedback for all the puzzles, and the game now auto-saves as well.
I also added a couple of cat ghosts because ... well, you can just never have too many cats in a game.
Some people might be interested in hearing a little bit more about my workflow with OpenfL.
So, just for them :
I used the
HaxeDevelop editor, a great IDE for Windows (free & open source). During development, I used the
Flash target (swf) for testing and debugging.
When the game was completely finished, I used the exact same code base to build an html5
version of the game (finally !!!), as well as a new Windows executable.
In the end however, I decided not to use the Windows EXE, because of this :
That's the directory structure I'm supposed to distribute together with the EXE ... Ouch !
Joshua told me he is working on a packing system for the assets, but until that's ready to go, I will use an
AIR distributable for download on Windows.
I also considered creating an Android version of Finding Fifi, but there are SO MANY screen sizes, and there's different sets of assets to create, and ... it's just too complicated for now. I'll probably make an Android version of my next game.
Edit (Dec '21) :
So sorry ...
You can no longer try out this web game since it is no longer compatible with the newer browsers.
I am however slowly porting 'Finding Fifi' to Godot. I suspect the game
won't be ready until Christmas next year ...