November 02, 2018 ❖ Tags: writeup, video-games, programming, game-development, lua, lisp, fennel
Slime the World was my entry to this year's Autumn Lisp Game Jam, and it managed to win second place. The theme was slime, so it’s a game about covering everything in sight with slime, and the dialect of Lisp I chose to use was Fennel, a simple and elegant Lisp that I feel perfectly matches the simplicity and elegance of Lua. It takes on a more "modern" style that I associate with Lisps such as Clojure. I had initially pushed Clojure to the side, feeling it was too different from Common Lisp, but now that I've had a positive firsthand experience with a Lisp where lists aren't the data structure you always reach for, I'm hoping to return to it with an open mind.
September 14, 2016 ❖ Tags: tutorial, programming, game-development, c
SDL2 is my favorite graphics library right now. It might not be as powerful as something like raw OpenGL, but it's simple. Simple enough that you can just pick it up and start using it. There's a glaring issue with it, though. The documentation is horrible. Absolutely horrible. A lot of it is unfinished, and it doesn't look like it's getting attention any time soon. The SDL1.2 documentation wasn't as bad, but that version of the library is vastly outdated by today's standards. So here's my take on a tutorial for SDL - part 0x00 of a I-don't-know-how-long-I'm-going-to-drag-this-on series. My examples are going to be written in C, because the constructs I show here can still be used verbatim in C++ (and probably SDL's other language bindings as well). This tutorial will be covering the little boilerplate that SDL requires, as well as the basics of windowing and rendering. Let's get into it.