I’ve been playing with Zig since 2019 I think and started on Tides of Revival in 2022 as my spare time project. We’ve released a few versions of the game since then, or “hills” as we call them. We released Hill 3 just the other day and you can download and run it.. well if you have Windows, or perhaps Wine? Hills are a bit like prototypes, especially at this stage, working towards a full game slowly but surely in significant full iterations, rather than a decades-long churn.
In this version of the game you run around on a world roughly 4x the size of Skyrim and hunt a monster. Have fun!
Three things in general: First, this is a project I envision I’ll be working on for a couple decades, there’s just so much to do in it. And it’s not a commercial project (ask me again in five years?) so there isn’t any deadline that we behold ourselves to. So I want to use the best tools we can, and switching now isn’t a terrible cost.
Second, at the end of Hill 3 we took a step back (as we always do at the end of a hill (or “top” of one, I suppose)), and thought about what we want to change for the next version, and there are a whole bunch of core technical changes we want to make. And so there is a lot we want to rewrite from scratch anyway.
Third, when I started Tides it seemed like Zig had a potential heading towards being a great game dev language. But as time has progressed it is clear that it’s focus is elsewhere, which is totally fine of course. And it’s not that it’s terrible - I would say that it is still better than C++ for gamedev in many ways, and C++ is of course the de facto game dev language. Jai is also a huge step up from C++, and unsurprisingly is also more aligned with game development than Zig is. IMHO, etc etc.
