(stevelosh.com) August 2016 Lisp Game Jam Postmortem / Steve Losh
ROAM_REFS: https://stevelosh.com/blog/2016/08/lisp-jam-postmortem/
Posted on August 15th, 2016.
The August 2016 Lisp Game Jam just wrapped up at the end of last week. I had some free time so I decided to take part, but I did something a bit different. Instead of making a new game I ported an existing one (Silt) to Common Lisp.
I once read somewhere that when trying to build things and learn programming languages you should either build something you know in a language you're learning, or build something new in a language you already know, but not try to do both at the same time. I've been getting into Common Lisp over the past year, so for this game jam I decided to port my Ludum Dare 34 game from Clojure to Common Lisp.
The game jam was ten days long. I didn't work on the game every day, but I did manage to finish porting it over. I improved and polished a few mechanics along the way, learned a lot, and ended up with a nice little library that sprung out of the code. I'm happy with the result.
The code is on Bitbucket. You can play the game over telnet if you want to try it out:
telnet silt.stevelosh.com. In this post I'm just going to jot down a few things I found interesting.Disclaimer: I'm going to simplify some of the code snippets to make them easier to read. If you want the full details you can read the actual code.