I’m working on the next game, although I gave myself an extended period of rest. After failing to complete the last one I needed to distract myself a bit from this activity, so I worked a bit on Fennel stuff, played some games, and I think I’m back in business by now.
Tags / fennel
I’m pleased to announce that most of my libraries for fennel are now shipped as single files! It was a long-standing issue with Fennel for me, as there was no clear way to ship both macros and functions in the same file, but after some experimentation, I figured out a way.
Lately, I’ve been working on async.fnl in my spare time and realized that the previous code that I used to schedule timers was terrible. Well, realized isn’t an appropriate word here, because I knew it back when I first implemented it, I just didn’t bother to make it better until I had a fully working library.
Well, this was fun! A bit exhausting, actually. The first of five months of the challenge has ended and here are the results:
Play Game1 on itch.io The game isn’t really complete, but I did my best to make it feel as complete as possible in the time constraints I had.
This post is midway through the last week I have to work on the game in a platforming genre. And it’s a bit of a shame because currently, I’m having a blast - now that the physics and camera are in place the game already feels like a playable thing.
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.
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.
After I explored asynchronous programming in my first naive implementation a few years ago, I was hooked on the idea of asynchronous communication in programs. Motivated to take this concept further I’ve created the fennel-async library that I’ve shown at FennelConf 2022. While this library works, and I’ve managed to write a simple socket-based REPL and integrate it into Emacs as an experiment, I wasn’t satisfied with the implementation.
In the previous post I’ve described how to define a simple protocol, upgrade the stock Fennel REPL with it, and create a simple client that works with this setup. And at the end, I mentioned that I was working on a proper client implementation and a more robust protocol as part of the fennel-mode package.
Recently I read a post by @nikitonsky about writing a custom REPL for Clojure and Sublime Text. What got my attention was a way of implementing a protocol over a plain Clojure REPL. In the post, Nikita describes a way to “upgrade” the connection by sending code that basically implements a new REPL to the main REPL process.