I participated in another Lisp Game Jam this time with more success. If you remember my last participation saw me come in last (place 14/14). Now this year around I ranked in 10th place (out of 16 submissions), a solid result and improvement. How did I achieve this? Preparation. In the last year I have written two scheme libraries, for colored terminal output and also for an entity-component-system engine. Both of these helped tremendously. Last time few could run the game because I had issues packaging the chickadee game engine. This time, I copied both tui and klecs library into the tarball and since they are all R6RS, anyone could run them using Chez scheme. Secondly the ECS approach to game design also really helped. This sums up my goals for this Jam as well: exercise these two libraries. I report to be happy with them.

Another goal was to improve the packaging/delivery of the game. This worked better than last time, but can still be improved. As the spritely institute folks improve their Guile to WASM compiler, we can hope to soon have Scheme in the browser.

As with every jam, I really wanted to finish a bit earlier so that I could focus on pretty graphics and game dynamics, but failed in that regard. I went on a trip during the jam which cost me some coding time. The result is that the game was a bit boring/easy to play once you figured out the mechanism. But do try for yourself.