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A comment on Game Development in Go.

Re:Game Development in Go by lloeki on Monday January 26, 2015 @10:29AM (#8947466)
When I decided to take part in LD48 #29 (which was the first time I did a gamejam), I went with golang. I did some research beforehand on the language, a few basic libraries and got me back on track with OpenGL which I did not use for years (and only ever as a toy). I maintained a log[0] and fed twitter regularly about my progress.

To sum up I was 1) on the move, 2) in a new language, 3) in a domain I only superficially know. Not precisely the best conditions to say the least, but I managed to read and map keyboard and mouse input, draw sprites, animated water (screenshot missing), and (almost) working point physics. Were I not aiming for the realistic physics but some crude old skool implementation, I'd definitely have a (very basic) platform game out as the last screenshot.

So, even at the lowest levels and using a few techniques I gleaned from watching Notch's Twitch stream on LD48 #28 it was loads of fun and extremely productive, even without support libraries or a dedicated engine. Hint: binding a reload hack thingy[1] to cmd+R[2] was the best thing I did, being stubborn about the Real physics thing was the worst.

[0]: https://github.com/lloeki/ld48-29/blob/master/log.mdown

[1]: https://github.com/lloeki/ld48-29/blob/master/ld48-29.go#L31

[2]: https://github.com/lloeki/ld48-29/blob/master/ld48-29.go#L65

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Re:Game Development in Go by joelgwebber on Monday January 26, 2015 @12:34PM (#8948290)
Nice work. Assuming my experiments convince me that writing games in Go is worthwhile, I'd love for the ecosystem to evolve to a point that it's trivially easy to get up and running. The fast iteration time is very nice for these competitions (now I just need a debugger).

I think it shouldn't be too much trouble to get to the point where we have a set of basic composable libraries for loading and rendering meshes and other graphics, as well as sound/input/etc. that doesn't require so much wiring. I haven't done the exercise yet, but I'm also hopeful that SWIG will provide good enough bindings to Bullet Physics, so that you won't stub your toe on "real physics" again :)

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