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+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).