Comment by technomancy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by technomancy | Hacker News Reader

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I'm working on a spaceflight game that features trading and can be operated from a text interface, though it features graphics by default. My vision is to be a bit more story-based than the procedurally-generated or MMO-type games would be, but it might be what you're looking for: https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard

It features programming as one of its core mechanics on top of the piloting features. I made a trailer for it here: https://p.hagelb.org/bussard-1.3.webm

My goal for the next beta is to make it so you can purchase an upgrade for your ship's computer in-game that would allow you to connect to it from an external program like Emacs over the nREPL protocol: https://gitlab.com/technomancy/jeejah You start the game without an autopilot routine, but eventually you find/write one, and at that point you can play from Emacs or Vim or the CLI or whatever. Right now the external connection only provides you with a REPL, but the protocol is extensible, and I plan to add features that would allow you to run more of a HUD-style REPL in your client of choice.

Moving away from clojure? I can't get to the itch.io site from work for some reason, but saw an older version github. What were some of the factors in choosing lua? Has it been weird, difficult, or liberating?

Not as much "moving away from Clojure" as "haven't needed to write any server-side code in a long time". I would still use Clojure for that, unless it was a socket-level cluster thing where BEAM would work better.

Lua is a great fit for this for several reasons. Mainly it's because I want to make it a game where you can learn to program, and teaching beginners Clojure is incredibly difficult. Lua's relentless simplicity really shines here. Teaching tables is a snap, and trying to teach lists, vectors, hashes, and structs in Racket makes my kids' heads swim. Secondly because the of in-game programming, you need sandboxing, and Lua has excellent facilities for this. And Lua's speed and access to the LÖVE game framework make it the best choice for games that I've found.

Lua has its problems, but in the context of games 90% of them can be summed up with "you had a nil where you didn't expect it" which is something Clojure is quite bad at too. I would say in some senses it's been liberating to work on a codebase that doesn't need to interact with the madness of the web, and being able to count my dependencies on one hand (and read through their sources exhaustively) is wonderful.

What were you trying to do on itch.io that didn't work?

I think it was just a corporate firewall issue. That manifests in odd ways that don't always point clearly to the firewall.

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