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**Sebastian Spaink:** I kind of missed that question. Yeah, that's right... I don't know if there's a better way of doing it than just building it and running it and being like "Well, it's a couple millimeters to the left", and then scoot it over. A big advantage of using Blender, if you use their interface, you can ju... |
**Angelica Hill:** Trial and error. |
**Sebastian Spaink:** Right, yeah. |
**Daniela Petruzalek:** I had an interesting experience with that when I was writing some games. Also, you do a lot of guessing in terms of positioning things... So in the end, I ended up using Steve Francia's -- I don't remember now if it's Viper or Cobra; that library that helps load the configuration dynamically... ... |
**Sebastian Spaink:** \[20:18\] Yeah, it was pretty quick in the sense that there was like -- I was using the Slicer program to get it to the 3D printed format, and I just... You can reload it in there. It felt pretty hacky, but -- yeah, I'm sorry; what were you gonna say? |
**Angelica Hill:** I was gonna say "Let's hear more." Let's go from 3D to 2D. Daniela, I would love to hear a little bit about -- you talked about some of your in-the-weeds, how you got it working, how you tested it... But what is your project, and how did it come to be? I would say, and I've said this to the group bef... |
**Daniela Petruzalek:** Right. I love this attitude, and I'm really happy that it had such an influence because from the beginning, since people don't know my project yet... Basically, I wrote this tutorial which I call Pac-Man From Scratch, or Pac Go for short, because it's not a man, it's a gopher, maybe... And the i... |
There are some things that Go makes really easy to do, especially -- for instance, if you want to separate your input handling from the main program, you can use a goroutine, and channels... So things like this in other languages - I tried to do this before in C++ and others, and you need to learn threads, you need to ... |
The whole idea of this project was to give the community something in terms of a tutorial, a starting point, a bit more interesting than building APIs. Because I know, APIs -- we ended up doing this for work. Why not having something more fun, that has visual feedback, so that you can see things moving on the screen? I... |
**Angelica Hill:** Yeah. And I think the beauty of it is exactly what you've just said, that people who are learning Go, whether from another language, or completely it's their first language, you go through that phase you're like going through all the Go tutorials, and you're trying to do this little app, and you're t... |
\[24:02\] And this is fun, it's colorful; as you say, it gives you that visual feedback, and it gives you, as a beginner, that feeling of accomplishment, and like "I did this. I've made it through that tutorial, and I accomplished this thing." |
I think the beauty of how you framed it is that you've really paid attention to making sure it is truly step by step, and it really does guide everyone through why you made the decision, how you did it, you provided the code so that you can look through... I'm waiting for your next game to come out. What's going on...?... |
**Daniela Petruzalek:** Yeah, I've been a bit busy with life, and things... Definitely, there are more things coming your way, yeah. Stay tuned. I did actually a talk at GopherCon UK about my next project, which now is a card game. I'm rebuilding an old '80s card game that -- I can't even say it was popular where I cam... |
I couldn't find an international version of it. I only had a scan of the cards that I used to reference the game, but basically, I'm rebuilding it. But now I'm trying to be a bit more professional, if I can say that. Definitely, I can say that. Nothing close to being a professionally, but... I'm using this library call... |
Yeah, so this work in progress - it's not very pretty now, but I have a functioning prototype, and the code is open source, but I didn't advertise it that much, because the game is ugly now. It's not very beginner-friendly. It was just kind of like a proof of concept, trying different things, learning everything as it ... |
**Angelica Hill:** It's hard not to say it. It's very easy to call into the pattern. So as you've been iterating on this project, as you've been building, and as you've been delving more into the world of games and programming for games, is Go a good language for these kinds of projects? Or was it that you already like... |
**Daniela Petruzalek:** I think Go is a very good language, with some asterisks, some side-notes maybe... Because the traditional language for writing games if you are old-school like me is C++, and C, and things like that. I tend to see Go as an improved version of those languages, because it abstracts so much. You do... |
The problems come -- because Go is traditionally a systems language, it's not very popular in the gaming industry, you don't have a lot of library support, and things like that. The basics you have - you have SDL bindings, you have Ebiten and a few other gaming libraries, but it's not widespread, so you don't have a la... |
But overall, I think that you can do good games with Go, and even Ebiten - they are just recently publishing their first game on Nintendo Switch... So you can see, it can be used for real games, like real commercial games. |
**Break:** \[28:05\] |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Daniela, I'm so very curious, as somebody who knows nothing about game development - when you say "gaming libraries", what kind of tools do they give you? What do you need in a gaming library? |
**Daniela Petruzalek:** A lot of things, actually... But I would say the most basic ones are how do you handle inputs? When you're writing a game, you don't really want to care if the player has a keyboard, a gamepad, or anything else. You don't want to worry about specific drivers for different types of inputs. You wa... |
The second thing is drawing to the screen, another good example. You don't really care about the low-level part of drawing to the screen, you just want to say "plot my pixel there", and that's it. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So like relative 10% down from the beginning of the screen, kind of... |
**Daniela Petruzalek:** Yeah. And I'm talking only about 3D; and 3D gets way more complex, but... Scaling operations, rotation... The kind of transformations you can do in an image. And also, sound is a huge thing. I don't want to write a music player. I should get this for free from my gaming library... Things like th... |
**Linus Lee:** That resonates with me a lot, actually. I'm not a big gamer, but occasionally I've come across little Steam games that I thought were really beautiful and well done. At times, I've had the thought of "Oh, maybe I should try to build a game of my own", and the thing that I always bump against -- so I can ... |
**Daniela Petruzalek:** Yeah. There's a huge iceberg of game development that's about -- the presentation is just a thin layer, but you have assets, in terms of art, sound effects and music. It's also -- it either kills your game, or it will give amazing results. |
But also, the whole part about game design, of how your game mechanics work, like what are the winning scenarios, what are your objectives, how can you make that thing rewarding for the player, so they will be engaged and really enjoy playing your game? How can you balance your game? This is a decent amount of challeng... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** I have a great idea for your game, Daniela, to make it pretty rewarding... You can use Sebastian's work and 3D print the cards. \[laughs\] |
**Daniela Petruzalek:** I think that's a great idea. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** \[32:10\] You know, you always feel paper cards in the hand, and once you'll feel more chunkier, reminding of like a phone, it will be very interesting. You'll have to pay more attention when you do that. |
**Sebastian Spaink:** Revolutionary. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** \[laughs\] |
**Angelica Hill:** Talking about something that's very challenging, engaging and rewarding... Linus. |
**Linus Lee:** Yes. |
**Angelica Hill:** Let's hear a little bit about your awesome project. |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, so my project is called Oak. It's a toy programming language, is what that means. It's a programming language that you can use to write things like web servers, and little apps, and command line interfaces, and things like that... But it's a toy language, so it's not something that you're gonna use... |
So part of it was designing the actual syntax and semantics of what the language is gonna be able to do, how it works, what are the types, what are the values, what are the things you can do, how do you define functions, and things like that... And the other part is actually implementing, in Oak's case, the interpreter... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** How did you come up with the idea to do this in Go? Did you say "I want to learn Go, and I want to learn Go by creating a new language"? |
**Linus Lee:** It was a mix, actually. So before Oak, there was Ink, which is the conceptual predecessor to Oak. They're very similar languages, but Ink was the first toy language that I made. I made it after having gone through a tutorial on how to make a basic Lisp interpreter, and I wanted to make something that was... |
At that point, I was mostly proficient with only the really dynamic languages, like JavaScript and Python, so I needed to learn a compiled language that was lower-level, to be able to build an interpreter that was actually usable. |
Go is not the typical language that you would use for such a task. You usually use like C++, or more increasingly common is Rust, or other languages like that. But as I've noted before, it was harder for me to wrap my head around those at the time, than it was for me to learn Go. Go was low-level enough for me to be ab... |
**Sebastian Spaink:** That's super-cool. Has anybody made anything real cool out of your programming language Ink? |
**Linus Lee:** I have... And then other people have used some of the stuff that I've built. Actually, one thing that's relevant for the Go community is - if you guys are familiar with the Go By Example website, where it sort of walks you through Go, and gives you different examples of how different parts of Go works...... |
So the website is inspired by Go By Example, but it's a website for Ink that someone else made, that isn't me, which was super-cool to see that there's another user for the language. And then on top of Ink, I've made a bunch of my own personal apps, like Twitter clients, and notes apps, and things like that, that I use... |
**Sebastian Spaink:** That's very cool. |
**Daniela Petruzalek:** You mentioned Lua in your opening statement... I was just wondering, because Lua is very common in the game development community, for AI scripts. |
**Linus Lee:** Right. |
**Sebastian Spaink:** \[36:05\] Would you see your language could be used for the same type of use, like writing scripts for AIs, or things like that? |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, that's a great question. So a lot of the domain of tool languages is actually fr embedding in other programs, and Lua is a great example of that. I think there's some specific things about Lua that make it really great for embedding in a game, specifically. The things that come to mind are -- Lua i... |
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