Hey folks! I just posted on my blog about my experience using TIC-80 to create This is my Mech which is a comedy/adventure game I entered in the 2019 Lisp Game Jam. It won first place!

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

In the blog post I mentioned a couple downsides of using TIC-80 over love2d, though overall I think it was a better fit for this game. The first is that when you work with a collaborator on git, if one person makes a change to the sprites and another makes a change to the music, it is treated as a conflict that can't be resolved, even though the two people did not edit the same contents. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has some workarounds for that or some ideas of how it can be fixed in the code. The other is that while the "watch" functionality is very nice, it requires restarting the game to take effect. I wonder how difficult it would be to change it so that you could trigger a reload followed by resume? This would make the flow much nicer for certain kinds of debugging.

In any case I had a blast making my first full-length game; I hope you enjoy it too.

I just implemented a feature that allows changes to the code to be reloaded when you resume without restarting the whole game:

https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/pull/840

It only works when you launch with the -code-watch flag, but if you build from master try it out and let me know what you think. In order to use it you will need to write your game so that the state is stored in a global and that it doesn't reinitialize that global if it already has a value when the code loads. It only works for languages that support eval, which right now is just Lua and Fennel.

Ok!