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The Spritely Institute joins the jam!

A topic by David Thompson created May 25, 2023 Views: 1,074 Replies: 5
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Jam HostSubmitted(+1)

I'm pleased to say that I work for a very cool place called the Spritely Institute and we will be dedicating some time over the next week to participate in the game jam! Our team will be split up on 2 projects:

  1. A text-based, networked game using our Goblins distributed programming platform. (Christine and Dave)
  2. A demo using the in-development Guile Hoot WASM assembler. (Robin)

This jam provides an excellent opportunity for us to spend some time eating our own dog food. To that end we've spent a bit of time prepping some scaffolding to support project #1, which can be found here: https://gitlab.com/spritely/fantasary

This  means that I most likely won't have time to use my Chickadee library this time around for a personal entry, but if anyone else does feel free to reach out on IRC if you need help. :)

Submitted (2 edits)

Spritely Goblins sound nice! Do you have any gophers about? Eating your own dogfood of hoots and goblins is some evocative imagery.

What's your feeling about (cross?) compiling games to wasm? I see hoot is intended to be a generic r7rs2wasm3r. Since I'm common lispy, I was thinking of swapping out SDL2 for just parenscript 'cause I'm not sure how ECL (boehm) will play with emscripten. scheme is garbage collected to, isn't it?

Jam HostSubmitted

We're big supporters of making games (and just applications in general) that run on WASM platforms (web browsers mainly.) The Guile Hoot project is broken into several phases. For this first phase we're targeting the r7rs-small Scheme standard because it's rather minimal. In a future phase we will add support for as much of Guile as possible in a web context (no POSIX API, for example) and will figure out how to interact with the DOM to render web pages. Our goal is to ship applications built with Guile and Goblins so that anyone with a web browser can use them. The gamer in me is hoping we'll eventually be able to hook into WebGL/WebGPU someday. :)

And yes, Scheme implementations use a garbage collector. For Guile Hoot we are using the WASM GC extension. Native Guile also uses the boehm collector but it's going to be replaced in the coming years with a better one called Whippet. I should also note that Guile Hoot is not using emcsripten. It's using a purpose-built assembler, disassembler, and compiler that outputs WASM binaries.

Jam HostSubmitted(+1)

Links to our entries:

Wireworld: https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2023/rate/2103611

Fantasary: https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2023/rate/2103526

Blog posts about both forthcoming!

Jam HostSubmitted(+1)

We wrote about what went into making Fantasary here: https://spritely.institute/news/lisp-game-jam---fantasary---prototyping-an-objec...

Jam HostSubmitted(+1)

We also just published a write-up about making WASM Wireworld, featuring a much improved version than was submitted during the jam that you can play with right in the blog post! https://spritely.institute/news/hoot-wireworld-live-in-browser.html