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Hi folks; author here. Definitely interested in getting feedback from playtesting either here or in the issue tracker. As for status, the engine is probably at

Hi folks; author here. Definitely interested in getting feedback from playtesting either here or in the issue tracker. As for status, the engine is probably at 85% completion or so; the remaining features are mostly just functionality that will enable additional programming challenges, like hooking in portal access control to an SQLite database or integrating a Forth interpreter for the finale. (There is already a lisp compiler functional in-game.) There is still a lot to do in terms of story, programming challenges, and plotting though. I have a fairly detailed backstory and outline plotted out, (see the spoilers/ directory) but it's going to be a lot of work to flesh it out into the game. My long-term goal is to make it a game that you can learn programming just by playing. I feel like most "learn to program" games end up feeling really contrived because they don't lay the groundwork to create a rich enough world to enable anything non-contrived. So my goal here is to create a fairly detailed simulation, and then find the places where you can use programming to overcome problems you run into. Anyway, obviously the project is OSS, so if you're interested in contributing, please drop me a line. Edit: if you're impatient and want to just download a single file and play, releases are at https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard

sdoering 10y ago
Hello OC-Author, thanks an awful lot. Will try this out. On a side-note: Great soundtrack recommendation. Bought the first Album already and am listening right now, while doing some data wrangling stuff. Imho great stuff for blocking out phoning colleagues and focussing.
jsingleton 10y ago
Interesting, nice work. Were you inspired by Mojang's cancelled 0x10ᶜ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c I see the fan version released a v0.1 a couple of days ago. https://github.com/trillek-team/tec/releases https://github.com/trillek-team/tec/releases
- technomancy 10y ago
  I heard about 0x10ᶜ after I had been working on Bussard for a while. There are similarities, but they are accidental. I specifically want my game not to include combat, and while early on I thought it would be an open-world thing, as it's progressed I've decided it would be a lot more compelling with a good story behind it. I may end up having an assembly language in the game, but it would be one of many languages rather than the only one.
georgehaake 10y ago
Can you tell us your considerations in choosing Lua? Especially as you are well known to the Clojure community.
- oyegashi 10y ago
  He leveraged the love game engine which is used to make 2d games in lua. I don't see anything that compares in clojure.
  - technomancy 10y ago
    That's part of it, but it's also because I want to use it to teach people how to program, and Clojure is really not a good choice for beginners. Learning Lua is a lot easier because it is dramatically simpler. It's also much easier to sandbox, and that is a key part of the game too; there are several layers of sandboxing going on.

sdoering 10y ago

Hello OC-Author, thanks an awful lot. Will try this out. On a side-note: Great soundtrack recommendation. Bought the first Album already and am listening right now, while doing some data wrangling stuff. Imho great stuff for blocking out phoning colleagues and focussing.

jsingleton 10y ago

Interesting, nice work. Were you inspired by Mojang's cancelled 0x10ᶜ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c I see the fan version released a v0.1 a couple of days ago. https://github.com/trillek-team/tec/releases https://github.com/trillek-team/tec/releases

technomancy 10y ago
I heard about 0x10ᶜ after I had been working on Bussard for a while. There are similarities, but they are accidental. I specifically want my game not to include combat, and while early on I thought it would be an open-world thing, as it's progressed I've decided it would be a lot more compelling with a good story behind it. I may end up having an assembly language in the game, but it would be one of many languages rather than the only one.

georgehaake 10y ago

Can you tell us your considerations in choosing Lua? Especially as you are well known to the Clojure community.

oyegashi 10y ago
He leveraged the love game engine which is used to make 2d games in lua. I don't see anything that compares in clojure.
- technomancy 10y ago
  That's part of it, but it's also because I want to use it to teach people how to program, and Clojure is really not a good choice for beginners. Learning Lua is a lot easier because it is dramatically simpler. It's also much easier to sandbox, and that is a key part of the game too; there are several layers of sandboxing going on.