Hiatus and Future Plans

I put this up on the official JALE fediverse account a while back, but I have good news and bad news.

Between starting college again, a joint project that's completely unrelated and coming along quite nicely, and the looming threat of Godot 4, I've decided to put JALE on hold for an indefinite period of time.

This does not mean I have lost interest. JALE is still very much a game I would like to see built, but I think the break is also a good idea for a different reason. I'm planning on transitioning from the 2.5D "layers" architecture to full 3D-rendering, if possible. This opens up options for existing 2D-gameplay player-types to not only jump back and forth between parallel layers, but rotate into a perpendicular plane to become top-down or simply provide multiple ways of moving from a single point; the end result would be not entirely dissimilar to the 2.5D of Kirby 64. On top of this, it also provides options for 3D player-types - the details of which I do not want to promise, because

JALE will likely resume development with a new title better emphasizing its nature as an experience intended for online play rather than simply a level editor - the title was somewhat of a joke about how it's derivative of Everybody Edits, but I feel the joke will likely be lost on a majority of people who have no idea what EE even was.

I apologize to anyone who was excited for this project - but I hope this is for the best. Engaging with this as my first networked project may have been a mistake - on one hand, cheating is unlikely to affect others negatively* so I would have quite a bit of a safety net if some exploit comes to light, but on the other hand, anyone with edit access has the full palette of mechanics to play around with and find interesting ways to break my feeble attempts at keeping clients and the server synchronized. Overall, I do not think I have the networking experience to try anything so grand as this - networking is, as many, many developers far more skilled than I have said, really really complicated, and having a platformer feel right is hard enough without that.

(*Any player without edit access in the current version can only affect themselves, so the worst they can do is teleport around spamming chat bubbles, and anyone with edit access already has the keys to chaos with the eraser tool anyways. The server might be able to do some weird injection nonsense with tilemap data, but I don't know how.)