I was using C++ for data-oriented gameplay coding, and I was interested in exploring making a language frontend that compiles to it to clean it up, as a side project (lots of dark corners to run into with C++, and I collected some experience on what those were since I'm managing a C++ game engine codebase at work). I needed a core that was basically a cleaned up C, which is what the C-ish core of Go is (the part other than goroutines, channels and GC), and Go has a good parser and typechecker library you can use. Goroutine and channel are cool for distributed server code or whatever, but not actually that useful for game programming. The main thing is having structs, procedures, some nice ergonomics over those (slices, type inference, non-escaping lambdas, occasional generics) and then metaprogramming so you can reflect over the data structures and have serialization and inspector UI. These are the elements actually relevant to game programming.