Giving up on Kartik

Published: 2021-08-22

Kartik has been maintained for 3 months now, and has been in active development for 6 months. As you know, good things come to an end; and Kartik isn't an exception.

Earlier today, I announced that I will be giving up on Kartik, which means the following:

• no new updates — the latest version will be 21.09.x;

• no bug fixes — I will however continue to help people get Kartik running on their machine

• no security fixes — only the game server will continue to receive patches to preserve the server's security

• no new features — let's say there are enough ^^

It's not that Kartik is not enough downloaded, I have some personal reasons for giving up on Kartik, and some other reasons.

As Bloom Kitty on Matrix pointed out, « it's a nice project for learning, but as a game it's fundamentally flawed, as we saw today »; and this is something I knew since the start.

Kartik uses Electron, a framework that is supposed to be used to build web applications; Kartik being one. Electron itself is flawed, and I don't really know how to use it. First of all, it uses too much resources. Then, it is very hard to debug and behaves randomly (apart from crashing, it was running poorly on Bloop Kitty's computer, despite not using the resources that much).

And the last one is that it takes up so much disk space. My development environment takes up 3 GiB. The Windows version is a 300 MiB download, and the Unix one (Linux and macOS) is a 500 MiB download; which is more than too much.

For me, Kartik was a fun and learning project, but it is more as a proof of concept rather than a real game. Therefore, I'm working on a new game (codenamed « Project Fluff »), that will be way better, and that won't have all the issues Kartik had.

So, Kartik 21.09, that will land on the stable branch on October 1st will be the last ever version of Kartik.

Thanks.