This is great. I've also tried my hand at making video games in Clojure. For me though, it was a weak attempt at a simple Bomberman clone that would be playabl

This is great. I've also tried my hand at making video games in Clojure. For me though, it was a weak attempt at a simple Bomberman clone that would be playable over the network, so that my kids could play it across our different family computers. It was even kid friendly, being about planting timed water balloons, and avoiding getting wet! It seemed like Clojure would be ideal for this, because the JVM has excellent networking libs and GUI libs for simple 2d graphics. But I severely underestimated how much time it would take though, so it never really even got to a playable single player state. The main part I got stuck on was trying to settle on a data format, how to represent tiles and players and items and everything, in a form of immutable data that was easy to both analyze and transform. The author's idea of mapping a giant 2d string to actual data is genius, although I suspect it wouldn't scale well for an RPG, and for my game it wouldn't have been very helpful since the terrain would be auto-generated (since needing to be somewhat randomized). It's surprising to see the author here mention using Agents as the original primary building block of the game engine. I've never directly used Agents or found them helpful. To this day I really don't know what they're good for.