Who knew that writing a post about how I’ve procrastinated for two whole weeks instead of following my own challenge would be so motivating? Immediately after I posted the previous post on Monday, I regained interest and started working on physics integration. Well, making a platformer without experience turned out to be harder than I thought, though I got stuck on things that are not platformer specific.
Categories / gamedev
Long story short, no progress so far. I’m starting to think that the way I’ve set this challenge up actually mostly demotivates me to continue rather than encourages me to press forward. To say that I’ve been working on Game1 will be both a lie to myself and to you.
As I stated a month ago, I’m going to force myself into game development with a personal game dev marathon1 that will span over the next five months. Technically, nothing prevents me from jumping off at any point, so I do want this to go as smoothly as possible, so I won’t burn out until I get out at least two games.
Quite recently a Fennel game jam happened on itch.io and I’ve decided to participate. I’ve been part of the Fennel community for some years, and every once in a while a lot of people from this community participated in a lisp game jam, but I’ve never made a game before, so I’ve skipped these events.
The last time I touched ClojureScript was almost two years ago. It was a really fun experience, and actually, it was a bit special to me personally. Prior to that post, I only learned lisp1 via books and mostly used it only for configuring Emacs, and while I’ve liked the idea of code as data and other lisp aspects, I never did anything more with the language.
Previously I decided to implement a rather basic raycasting engine in ClojureScript. It was a lot of fun, an interesting experience, and ClojureScript was awesome. I’ve implemented a small labyrinth game and thought about adding more features to the engine, such as camera shake, and wall height change.
Ray casting is quite an old technique, that was heavily used in the early days of game development in a lot of games to create an illusion of 3D space. The most known example, and perhaps the first widely successful game that used this technique, was Wolfenstein 3D, made by ID Software in 1992.