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diff --git a/posts/2013-08-07-guile-2d-devlog-1.md b/posts/2013-08-07-guile-2d-devlog-1.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1b36772 --- /dev/null +++ b/posts/2013-08-07-guile-2d-devlog-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +title: guile-2d - A 2D Game Development Framework for GNU Guile +date: 2013-08-07 23:00:00 +tags: foss, gnu, guile, scheme, gamedev, wsu +summary: I have started work on a 2D game framework +--- + +This is the very first devlog entry for my pet project, guile-2d. As +the title suggests, guile-2d is a 2D game development framework for +[GNU Guile](https://gnu.org/s/guile), a Scheme implementation that has +the honor of being the official extension language of the GNU +project. Guile is a language with a growing number of features, but it +still lacks a large assortment of libraries. I like to do 2D game +programming, and I saw a niche that needed to be filled. Python has +Pygame, Lua has Love, but there’s no fun and accessible game +programming library for Guile. Guile-2d is working to correct that. + +The goal of Guile-2d is to create an easy to use 2D game programming +framework. Libraries like SDL give the programmer a rather low-level +set of tools that they can use to build a game, guile-2d will provide +high-level tools over low-level SDL and OpenGL for commonly used +elements of 2D games: tile maps, sprite animation, particle systems, +collision detection, vector math, A* pathfinding, etc. Such features +will allow a game developer to very quickly produce a working +prototype with guile-2d. + +Guile-2d is a framework, which means that it has some opinion about +what the right way to do things is. The most apparent example of this +is the game loop. The game loop runs at 60 frames-per-second and uses +fixed timestep updates. Those that have read +[Fix Your Timestep](http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/fix-your-timestep/) +will know that this decision is a good thing. + +Perhaps the most important feature of guile-2d is the ability to do +“live coding”. When the game loop starts, a REPL +(read-eval-print-loop) server is started. Using the great +[Geiser](http://www.nongnu.org/geiser/) extension for Emacs to connect +to the REPL server, one can modify their game as it is running. This +gives users the power to evaluate some new code and see the changes +reflected immediately in the game window. No need to restart the game +unless you crash it! + +This has been a brief overview of some of the features and goals of +guile-2d. If this project interests you, you can check out the source +code on [Github](https://github.com/davexunit/guile-2d). |