Lisp Game Jam 2019: Results | Hacker News Reader

Lisp Game Jam 2019: Results

itch.io

84 pointstosh8 comments

There’s a really interesting and active sub-community of Lisp game developers. Baggers, Steve Losh, mfiano, borodust, dto, and 3b are but a few of the recurring names. There’s even a start-up game company building a large non-trivial game in Lisp [0]. A list of games written in Lisp is here [1]. Baggers has a huge amount (>100 videos!) of youtube content on programming the full graphics pipeline in Lisp [2] and he continues to post week to week.

If you have the impression that Lisp is only used by a bunch of academic knuckleheads like myself, check these folks out!

[0] https://defungames.com/

[1] https://github.com/lispgames/lispgames.github.io/wiki/Lisp-G...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/user/CBaggers

I wrote a game in Lisp 24 years ago - imho still fun to play.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_(video_game)

It’s open source and available on tons of platforms.

Also Naughty Dogs of Jak & Dexter and Crash Bandicoot fame - mostly due to Andy Gavin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Gavin

Is clojure welcome in these communities? It’s my first lisp, but after 3 years of using it, it’s become quite dear to my heart. I’ve been learning about roguelikes while diving into a pixi.js interop.

>Must be written in any dialect of Lisp. This includes, but is not limited to Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, and Clojure.

from https://itch.io/jam/autumn-lisp-game-jam-2018

From the last 2-3 Jams, IMHO, you can see a tendency towards exo-lisps as many entries were done with Fennel or some in Urn.

It's been a game changer for me observing the elegance and productivity of the Fennel language (https://fennel-lang.org/) combined with Love2d (love2d.org) and LuaJIT. Thanks to Phil Hagelberg for his documenting of his experiences (http://technomancy.us) and his work on a decent emacs mode for Fennel. Check out his previous winning entry, particularly the code that drops you in a repl and lets you live change a running Love game here: https://technomancy.itch.io/exo-encounter-667

As a guy who has primarily only used lisp to script AutoCAD, but has used Lua for ML, is this language just for Lispers who need Lua libraries or is there something implicitly better about it than just using, for example, Lua?

It's not implicitly better than using straight Lua, no. It just seems to hit the sweet spot of Lisp, game library and interactive development for me.

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