I made a game and engine in D that's a cross between Superliminal and Viewfinder, and you can play the demo now

[Chris Katko]

On Monday, 24 February 2025 at 03:08:11 UTC, Lewis wrote:
> Hello! I'm Lewis, a solo developer from Vancouver. I've been 
> working on [The Art of 
> Reflection](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2290770/The_Art_of_Reflection/) for ~4 years. It's basically Superliminal meets Viewfinder with mirrors, with a bit of Portal and The Witness thrown in for good measure.
>
> I built the game and engine from scratch in D, using D3D11, 
> PhysX, FMOD, and a few other libraries. Happy to answer any 
> questions about the process, but in short I'm super happy with 
> my decision to use D. I honestly can't really imagine going 
> back to C++ at this point.
>
> You can play the demo right now if you want to give it a spin. 
> Feedback is always welcome and appreciated.
>
> Thanks so much for your support!
>
> -Lewis

I'm so glad you posted this! I've done many game projects 
(usually D and DAllegro) for many many years but nothing worth 
completing. I've written similar things with static pools for 
everything, and for strings I massively sped things up by writing 
a simple static string class that just allocates larger if it 
needs to be. Before when I started storing debug data inside my 
game objects, I was hitting like 1500 allocations a second, it 
was absurd. I've long wondered about using DLLs, as well as 
template compilation time. I remember when simply including 
std.regex quadrupled my compile time.

Have you considered doing a blog writeup on your experiences, 
hacks, and changes? I'd love to read it.