[lisp-game-dev] Gamemacs: an idea for a modular, extensible, capable and easy to use game-development IDE

[Joop Kiefte]

Hello guys,

At the moment I am gathering together all pieces of the Climacs editor to
start an open source project to create a modular, extensible, capable and
easy to use game-development IDE. Until I switched to Linux I have made some
games with Game Maker, a fine but windows only piece of software that is too
commercialized nowadays for me to like it as it is now, and I (and some
others as well I think) have been looking for a good replacement on linux
for quite some time. As most good programmers I am extremely lazy and don't
like to do repetitive work if I can prevent it, and as such have skipped
things like py-game.

I have done a little bit of fiddling with clojure and as I see it now some
gaming stuff is coming up for clojure as well, but I didn't feel like gaming
is the perfect bet for clojure. Now I am programming for a small company in
common lisp and doing that I feel like I need some open source project to
keep in shape on common lisp on the side line. So I thought, let's make a
game maker clone!

I am not going to make things from scratch, it won't be useful to do and
besides, if there is nothing to build upon, we won't even get started. So I
thought this might be a perfect use for climacs. It might even be a revival
of the climacs project if you like. Gamemacs is just a working name (and a
bit more, as I will explain later), I mean to contribute to the several
sub-projects and with normal add-ons as much as possible, to keep everything
as modular as possible.

To not keep things vague, and to have a good direction, this is a list of
things I want to have for a nice game-editor (and in general to make of
Climacs an emacs-killer instead of an emacs-clone), most of it taken from
Game Maker:
* Integration of something like Lispbuilder (most probably just
Lispbuilder).
  - It has SDL
  - It has OpenGL
  - It has an .exe-creator/binary compiler
* Integration of the .exe-creator/binary compiler in the editor itself
* Publish versions of Climacs compiled that way to make further development
easier
  - so for basic development of games you don't even need to install
anything else than that compiled version of climacs
  - we can call this compiled package with extensions Gamemacs, and keep the
source pure climacs, so it remains as modular as it can be
* I would like to have a generic graphical editor for lisp-code on top of
the textual editing mode.
  - and this to be extensible with cool graphical editors for example to
create levels (I think I will need to make a mock-up of this idea to get it
clear)
* Create libraries for game-development that are included by default and
work nicely with the graphical interface so you will be able to make simple
games with mostly point and click and harder games with a great emacs-like
editor :)

I have all this quite detailed in my head, but after dumping it all here I
want your input as well, so it will be great to work with. In the end my
goal is to have fun creating games on linux and to be able to sketch and
prototype and build games all in one place. (If you can develop everything
for emacs in emacs without leaving it, why shouldn't you be able to create
games without hassle?)

First things I will do anyhow (but help is appreciated on all sides!):
* Put all the dependencies of climacs on Git
* Build climacs and fiddle with it to get accustomed to the inner workings
* Same with lispbuilder etc.

What do you think?

Greetings,

Joop Kiefte

-- 
Communication is essential. So we need decent tools when communication is
lacking, when language capability is hard to acquire...

- http://esperanto.net  - http://esperanto-jongeren.nl

Linux-user #496644 (http://counter.li.org) - first touch of linux in 2004
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