Part 2:
What did you learn?
Mainly the lessons I outlined in What went wrong. After each game-jam I take the lessons and I apply them to InfiniteLives. And I refactor out any common code from the games into InfiniteLives. I guess I learnt to love Clojure more than I do already!
What did Lisp enable you to do well in this entry?
I find Lisp enables me to manipulate and refactor code quickly and easily. Because the editor can understand the syntactic structure of the code, it can help you in ways that it can't when you are writing in other languages. Emacs helps a lot here with paredit and expand-region and Emacs macros. Also to state the obvious, Lisp macros are a godsend in helping you remove boilerplate that higher order functions can't remove. Like the aforementioned go-while macro.
I find Clojure helps even more than your usual Lisps by being immutable. Immutability just helps everything come together at the end so seamlessly. Nothing inadvertently impacts anything else because nothing changes! So even when you are rushed and write really shitty code (my game-jam code is often shitty), it all comes together in the end seamlessly and without any crashes or bugs.
Also by forcing all your mutation to occur through the registration of pure functions that the STM applies to the atoms on your behalf, it makes all the state mutations happen through one point. So an example of how this helped in this game was right at the end when I had to add bonus lives. You get a bonus life at 10,000 points, 60,000 points and then every 50,000 from then on. Because all the state lives in this one giant state atom and all the change happens to it via a pure function operating on the old immutable value, and returning a new immutable value to replace it, adding this functionality right at the end was trivial. Rather than the score changes being sprinkled all around the code, they were all in one spot. And in that spot I had the old value of the atom, and I had calculated the new value. So if the old value was less than 10,000 and the new value was more than or equal to 10,000, you had gained another life. And the life was in the same atom. It's all there in that atom. So I just return the new lives as part of the returned immutable value to replace it in the atom. And it works perfectly.
What challenges did Lisp present in making your entry happen?
The only real challenge that ClojureScript throws up in game-jams that I've learnt to switch off is advanced compilation. The advanced compilation in ClojureScript is incredible giving you extremely small compiled JavaScript artefacts that run extremely fast and includes things like dead code removal and symbol minification, but it can be time consuming to get your code to run correctly as you have to specify all your external namespaces. This time consuming work can really destroy your morale in a game-jam so I've long ago learnt to switch it to simple compilation for jams. The code then is fast enough and all those tricky issues go away. If you are really eager later, you can switch it to advanced compilation and then deal with any badly munged names and write your externals files then.
If you are comfortable answering, please you mention how long you have used lisp and describe previous gamedev experience, if any.
I learnt Common Lisp many years ago but never really got deeply into it. Then about four or five years ago a developer I was working with at the time switched me onto Clojure and I have been using it heavily since then.
Back in the old days I did some game development for the Gameboy Advance in C and C++, then subsequently made some games with Python. I've been using Clojure and ClojureScript now for about 5 years and have done 2 global game jams and about 5 ludum dares with it since then. If you want to check out some of my other game-jam work you can see it all on my github.