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Comment by cmovq | Hacker News Reader

The scripting language looks like it would be more cumbersome to use than C.

I did a double-take at

    > Executes one line of script per frame (~60 lines/sec).

Makes the "runs at 60FPS" aspect of the engine feel a lot less relevant. At this speed, anything more complex than Pong would be a struggle. Even a CHIP-8 interpreter is usually expected handle a dozen or so comparably expressive instructions per frame.

Don’t worry, you can’t have that many lines anyway…

> Up to 128 script lines per program

Which is why I love this. Extreme constraints. Takes a lot of creativity to make something interesting, without feeling overwhelmed with possibility. I'm considering making tiny arthouse game projects with this.

،sh12

I agree. It seems like interpreting one instruction per frame is the developer's way to guarantee real-time performance. I don't want to discourage the developer from experimenting with this design. What I think they should do is determine the most instructions they can interpret each frame.

I like the idea of on-device programming like this. While I haven't used it, I know there is a DSiWare application Petit Computer that lets you implement more complex (sprite-based) games in a Basic dialect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petit_Computer. As DSiWare, it has an official video trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AYlEo3rJHs.

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