Conspire: A Programming Environment for NOWHERE

Leonard actually addresses that in a few a places, though I don't have a link handy right now. The short version is they're creating a game that's almost entirely defined by procedural content.

To even attempt such a thing requires a lot of good tools because they not only need those tools to build procedural content for the game but for their userbase to be able to as well.

He seems well aware of the trap here and is trying his best to avoid it.

As an early backer of the project and fan of paniq's, I'm happy to let he and his wife go off on tangents like this, because I know whatever they build is going to be awesome. Of course, most backers are probably not as pumped about text editing environments and game dev tooling as I am :P

There's Smalltalk env too, like Pharo/Squeak, the long forgotten Lisp Machine, Max/MSP and their descendant... A lot of giants on which shoulder we can see a bright future !

If you want knowledge from the same pool Ritter's drawing from, check out this blog post[1] about fr-041: Debris by ryg. Now, keep in mind, Ritter didn't do work on Debris as far as I know, but he's spent a lot of time with the people who did, and some of the ideas in NOWHERE have their origin in that scene (a lot of it is totes original, but you're asking about procedural generation, and procedural generation is definitely a demoscene thing).

Before game dev, Ritter was known as a musician and a demoscener (if you don't know what the demoscene is, do some googling -- it's deffo worth it). The demoscene group he was part of broke exciting new ground in the mid 2000s by releasing some productions that packed ridiculous amounts of content into a very small size by procedurally generating lots of things, like textures and geometry. The greatest of these demos is called Debris[2], and some consider it the best demo ever. Ryg's article is basically a big index of articles explaining how parts of Debris were written, as well as how they work.

[1] https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/debris-opening-the-...

[2] Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxfmxi-boyo

and keep in mind that everything you're seeing was rendered in real time by a single executable 177kb in size.

[3?] Also worth looking at: http://www.iquilezles.org/www/index.htm

Actually, I very much wanted to do that, the problem is that there seems to be no Scheme implementation available that offers such a tight and convenient libffi integration. LuaJIT parses preprocessed C header files with very few adjustments. Terra, which links LuaJIT with LLVM, goes the full mile and directly uses libclang to generate interfaces.

If you know a Scheme implementation that does this (including supporting a LLVM back-end in addition to a regular, possibly JIT'ed interpreter), please do not hesitate to mention!