Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
(+1)

I've built my roguelike game on Love2d engine, but instead of using the Lua programming language, as you would expect, I've used a dialect of LISP, the second oldest programming language. Yeah, I'm that tech geek :D

The dialect I've used called Fennel, and it is already proved itself to be a good choice for a game jams, see, for instance, those games: Gravity: FallFrog Collect CheeseEXO_encounter 667 (that last one even managed to win the game jam it was written for, Lisp Game Jam 2018). Basically Fennel is just a layer of LISP syntax over good old Lua, so you still can cut yourself with its sharp corners, e.g. its awkward associative arrays called tables. The advantage Fennel gives is that the code you write becomes quite easy to navigate and hack on, because, well, it is mostly parentheses (they abbreviate LISP as Lots of Silly Parentheses for a reason :D). So for my game it allowed me to implement quite a large amount of mechanics I've never done before - a random maze with doors, items, item durability, different mob classes, ranged and close combat weapons and some others :) And all it took was just around 25 hours (I use IDE plugin that measures the time I've spent coding, lol).

I do recommend to at least take a look on that tech stack. Oh, and you can use the source code of my game as the example (look for *.fnl files).

Oh, and if you have a chance, please rate my game https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/460262 :3