To Blitzmax or not to Blitzmax

I've done this to myself many times over the last few years and figured it was an interesting topic to talk about and I wonder if I'm just a weirdo or perhaps other aspiring game makers do this too. Ok I'm probably a weirdo regardless.

Given the pace that I'm making this game I always think there might be something better that I could be using, such as Unity 3D for example. Over a year ago when I took up Blitzmax I was confident it was what I was looking for and wanted and something I could stick with. I was using Torque Game Builder before that but it wasn't a good fit. Recently a thread was created on the Blitz forums about how there aren't any updates left to it and wondering of Blitz is going to be obsolete in the near future. I also read comments how Blitz is sorely lacking some essential features like AStar and items like that.

Now of course I read it and it fed the always present self doubt that I have about the time investment I'm making and if using Blitz is still the way to go. Maybe I should take up Unity 3D so I can eventually get my game published on the ipad really quickly and other platforms with one code base. Maybe Blitz could be a lot better and it's past it's life span.

I ran some searches on making a isometric rpg with Unity and found very little. I saw some posts asking if you "can" make an isometric rpg with Unity and the answer is the generic "you can make anything you want".  I also read a blog of an indie that has actually made a few games and he is into Unity and he talked about how there are a lot of "tricks" to making a good rpg with Unity.

It took me about a day to realize I already had been down that road before and forgot the lesson I learned. I'm not a very good programmer by any means. I can't look at source files in an engine and figure out what's going on (or at least with any ease) or make any modifications to it. I had really struggled with the Torque engine because while it has a lot of great features a lot of the work I did was figuring out how make feature X work with design Y. It really did get exhausting after a while, always jumping hurdles to figure out how to make it work.

I'm sticking with Blitzmax and I'm not letting a few forum threads influence me. Just because something can be bigger and better it doesn't mean it's really for you. I remember reading that Cliff Harris still used I believe Directx 7.x to make his games until recently where he upgraded one version. And I also thought about people's comments how Blitz is lacking features like Pathfinding. I already made a pathfinding system in Blitz that works great and it's coded to exactly what I need.

So yea I'm sticking with what works for me and what I'm comfortable with and I'm not going to adopt the "grass is always greener on the other side" motto.