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Some time ago I studied a little of Lisp for fun, and recently I found this lisp game jam. Jumping into graphics could be an overkill, so if I ended up participating with a text based game. There is a C lib to easily handle a terminal, and it looks like some folk made a wrapper to lisp. Thanks to people at #lispgames @freenode, very helpful.

In this post, I’ll show the steps I followed in order to configure my environment with Lisp, Emacs and package managers. I won’t cover the steps in detail, but just plainly list them in order to help me in further installations.

In the last Demux devlog post I sketched the idea of what kind of game Demux wants to be. In this post I will talk about map representation and generation, which is probably the most important part to the project and the one I do want to highlight. The game is understood as a metroidvania with generated maps, so we first need to formalize the key parts of a Metroid or Castlevania maps.

Recently I discovered test-driven development and sincerely, I felt like if I had discovered the philosopher stone. Something very useful when approaching development this way are coverage tests in order to check which parts of your code are actually being tested and which are just being skipped.

For this task, one of the available open source options is gcov, that basically collects coverage data from an application execution (ideally a test).

Demux wants to be a shooting platformer using procedurally generated maps. The game should resemble some metroidvania elements to take in mind for the map generation, like having the need of getting an ability to travel to new areas of the map.

Recently, I’ve been interested on starting to contribute to the mesa project. My current knowledge is not enough to do great stuff, but I would learn a lot for sure, and here it is my first experience.

I’ve learnt about some topics related to the workflow needed to contributing at a big project like mesa, like sending patches with git. I have been using git for quite a while on personal projects, informal projects with people and a little more formal projects at work, but I don’t stop learning, and got a few tricks here.