itch.io

Yesterday, we released Hoot 0.9.0 and updated the template repo accordingly. Also, a new contributor added basic gamepad support so there's now a starting point for more than just keyboard input.

One day until the jam! Have fun everyone!

This seems fine to me! Have fun!

If you are interested in making a web browser game with Scheme then Hoot is a great option for you! Hoot is a Scheme to WebAssembly compiler that supportsR7RS-small and a subset of Guile such as delimited continuations (useful for scripting games via coroutines). The  Hoot game jam template repository on Codeberg has everything you need to get started.

The template repository includes:

• Bindings to the necessary web APIs to make an interactive game with HTML5 canvas
• A Makefile for compiling, running a development web server, and generating a .zip bundle for uploading to itch.io
• A very simple Breakout-like example game that demonstrates how to put all the pieces together

Some games made with Hoot for past jams:

• https://davexunit.itch.io/cirkoban
• https://davexunit.itch.io/strigoform
• https://podatus.itch.io/shields-tyvm

I'll do my best to help anyone that uses Hoot for the jam, whether here in this forum, on the official Spritely forum, or on the #spritely channel on the Libera.Chat IRC network. Have fun!  🦉

Asking on behalf of Alexander Shendi who is trying to form a Lisp gathering at the 39th Chaos Computer Club and was wondering if anyone wanted to talk about their experience making games with Lisp.

Details on Mastodon (I don't attend this conference so I don't really understand it all):

https://rollenspiel.social/@alexshendi/115565869219718040

https://rollenspiel.social/@alexshendi/115513496629603264

Update your project as much or as little as you want!

Thanks for the clarification! The list has been updated.

Okay I have clearly upset the Lisp historians. Please accept this Schemer's humble apologies.

I have no idea how this would work but I think it would cause issues.

Hmm, interesting. I will make Interlisp a separate category but in my head it's still basically Common Lisp.

I'm confused by this. The source code contains a Gauche Scheme file.

Below is the breakdown of Lisps used for this edition of the jam, ordered by popularity:

1. Fennel: 9
2. Clojure: 3
3. Guile: 2
4. Other: 2 (Jester, a Lisp made for the jam AFAICT, and Lisp in 1k lines of C)
5. Common Lisp: 1
6. Interlisp: 1
7. Kawa: 1
8. Racket: 1
9. S7: 1

For some entries it is unclear what Lisp was used without further investigation. I think I'll amend the rules next time to make this a requirement. 

I hope you mean bytevectors because regular Scheme vectors will be very inefficient for buffer data!

• Hoot is a whole-program compiler so compilation times are longer than in separate compilation because there's simply a lot more code to deal with. However, it's possible to compile multiple separate modules and have them work together. One module would serve as the primary module that exports its ABI and the other modules would be secondary modules that import their ABI. I recently did this for a program by splitting up the backend (which was a lot of code that rarely changed) and the frontend (which was much smaller and quicker to compile). The --mode=secondary flag for guild compile-wasm is what you should look into. In JS, you'd call load_main for the main module and then load_extension for each secondary module. See here for an example.
• Correct, Geiser is not supported right now so there isn't really a usable workflow for live hacking.. We have plans for a geiser-hoot.el package but we haven't gotten to it yet. Since the REPL would be running inside a web browser tab, it cannot act as a REPL server like we need it to. Resolving this will require introducing a WebSocket daemon middleman, much like Fennel's webrepl.  I hope this is something I can work on soon.
• Yes, I would like to catch that unbound top-level error and print a better message rather than just a raw backtrace. That error is generated from an early phase in the compiler defined in the (hoot library-group) module. I filed an issue to track it.

What were you having trouble with? Any specific canvas methods?

If you are interested in making a web game using Scheme then Hoot is a great option for you! Hoot is a Scheme to WebAssembly compiler that supports most of R7RS-small and some Guile extensions such as delimited continuations (useful for scripting games via coroutines). Our game jam template repository on Codeberg that has everything you need to get started making 2D games.

The template repository includes:

• Bindings to the necessary web APIs to make an interactive game with HTML5 canvas
• A Makefile for compiling, running a development web server, and generating a .zip bundle for uploading to itch.io
• A very simple Breakout-like example game that demonstrates how to put all the pieces together

Some games made with Hoot for past jams:

• https://davexunit.itch.io/goblinville
  
• https://davexunit.itch.io/cirkoban
• https://davexunit.itch.io/strigoform
• https://fluxharmonic.itch.io/lambda-dungeon
• https://podatus.itch.io/shields-tyvm

I'm currently working to release a new version of Hoot before the jam starts.

I'll do my best to help anyone that uses Hoot for the jam, whether here in this forum, on the official Spritely forum, or on the #spritely channel on the Libera.Chat IRC network. Have fun!  🦉

I like the look and feel of this game a lot! I found the mechanics a little hard to get my head around, though. The tip about buying a travelpass upgrade first was helpful. I sold a thing or two but I was selling at a loss so I am but a poor space cowboy it seems.

Thanks for making something with Hoot!

I shot all the cubes with my cube. Wish there were more cubes to shoot. Nice job using Hoot for this!

I enjoy Sokoban-likes with a story element so this was fun for me! The art was really great. I liked the use of limited moves for the puzzles. All the puzzles felt very beginner level to me, and I wish there were more challenging ones to solve.

1Very spooky. Seems there is so no happy ending to be found, heh. I liked the page turning effect and the eye cursor. Wish there was more to do! Nice job using Hoot for this!

I love games that take familiar rules and apply them in a new way. Balatro is to poker as Monster Chess is to chess??? I made it through all of the levels, maybe around half of them on par. I liked having the par number because then I could feel proud about not only solving the puzzle but solving it in few moves. The introduction of a second white piece was cool. Would have liked to see that developed more. Nice job!

This game taught me that if  I were out in the hexagonal wasteland I'd probably starve. Nice graphics and atmospheric background music. I felt really limited by only having 4 inventory slots and I never made it very far but it was cool!

Okay so there really needs a full game that involves fediverse moderation that leads to a grand conspiracy! I think I got the "true" ending. I wish I could press the space bar or something to advance the narrative rather than moving my mouse over "next" repeatedly. Nice job and very cool that you used Hoot for this!

Had fun with this one once I "got it"!For some of the puzzles I wished I could move the camera in addition to panning and zooming. Great job!

At first I thought I just had to run away from the enemies but then I realized I could run into them to kill them and started having fun. I wish the movement inputs didn't rely on key repeat so they'd be more responsive and that the player moved a little faster. Thanks for making a game with Hoot! I love to see it.

Any game where you play as a dog is off to a good start. This was a simple and fun Vampire Survivors-like ;). The collisions between the dog and the bats felt a little unforgiving, leaving me wondering how I got hit. When I tried to restart the game it seemed to freeze and the music stopped playing so I had to refresh to try again. Would be cool to see an upgraded version of this in a future jam!

I really enjoyed the look and feel of this game! Loved the CRT TV screen filter. I couldn't figure out how to play it effectively, though.

I love the cabbage lambda! Wish I had been online to greet you. Thanks for trying it out!

Thanks for trying it out! Sorry I wasn't online to greet you in-world.

Oh and re: Safari: Apple still has not shipped the bug fix to their Wasm tail call implementation that makes Hoot binaries work. I hope browser compatibility is no longer an issue by the next jam (which is something I said last jam, so we'll see.)

Thank you!

Haha, a lovely tale of lag and cabbage related bugs. Thanks for trying! (and apologies for all the bugs)

What is the source code for this entry? The markdown file? I am confused.

Could you provide a link to your source code, per the jam rules? Thanks!

I hesitate to call this a game but the jam has been a nice opportunity to work on a little multiplayer tech demo using Liberated Pixel Cup assets.

You can't cond-expand a module definition because you need the module definition in order to know what names are imported, including cond-expand. Rather than wrapping define-module in cond-expand, you need an inner cond-expand.  Unfortunately, Guile's define-module doesn't support a cond-expand form. Fortunately, R7RS's define-library does! So, you'd want to do something like this:

(define-library
  (cond-expand
    (hoot (import (web dom)))
    (else))
  (export message)
  ...)

Ah yes, good idea! We should update the template repo with it for next jam.

You're close! The misunderstanding seems to be that your are expecting that instantiating the module will modifiy the top level REPL environment. This is not the case and it would be kinda scary if it did that. Wasm modules are their own separate, isolated things. If you want a reference to the make-text-node procedure then you should return it by referencing it in the final line of the program you're compiling with Hoot. From there, run hoot-load on the instantiated module and if you've done everything correctly, the result will be a reference to the make-text-node procedure. The tutorial in the manual goes through this process in more detail.