trivial-gamekit's future

Lisp Game Jam 2019 is over and there are quite a number of submissions based on trivial-gamekit this time:

• Decent Magician Of the Moldy Dungeon
• NOTALONE: AGAIN
• Pong Fight
• Split-Shot
• Lispout

Thanks to everyone who participated and I’m especially grateful to authors of above games for their trust in gamekit. Any jam is a stress and having solid tools during this time is very important. Thank you for giving gamekit a chance!

I’ve received a couple questions about trivial-gamekit future and what direction it is heading.

Here’s my answer.

With latest additions to gamekit (gamepad support and customizable rendering and logic update rates) I think its API is rich enough while still quite simple to use. Backward compatibility is a very important goal: no change will be made in public gamekit API that would break existing projects based on it.

All this means it is unlikely gamekit itself would see any substantial API changes in the future. I think it serves its purpose very well right now and will in the future. In no sense this means gamekit is abandoned - if there are bugs or you think it still misses an essential feature - fire an issue or contact me directly and we will resolve all those problems together.

At this point you might have thought that this is a bit sad news - gamekit has so much potential. You are right! And here goes new chapter in trivial-gamekit development :)

Instead of extending gamekit API indefinitely (making it less and less suitable for simple games, much harder to understand and derailing it farther away from its initial goals), new features, experimental or not, are going to be implemented as plugins!

One day while looking into ways to handle complexity in gamekit-based games I discovered it actually is quite extendable. Just inherit a class in defgame form with special functionality you need, hook into gamekit instance methods (#'draw, #'act, #'post-initialize and #'pre-destroy), provide some :default-initargs and you can go far in extending its functionality.

So here I present a new way of extending gamekit - kinda plugins. And first of the kind I found useful for jam games:

trivial-gamekit-fistmachine

Simple finite-state machine implementation for handling state transitions in gamekit-based games

trivial-gamekit-input-handler

Utility class for switching and controlling input in trivial-gamekit - handy for enabling and disabling different control schemes at any point of time, especially when transitioning between game states (menu->play->pause->play etc)

trivial-gamekit-postproc

Shader-based post-processing in gamekit! Also allows you to change resolution of the underlying framebuffer, meaning you can render your game undersampled (true unblurred 256×224 resolution on HiDPI displays anyone?) or supersampled (8k on FullHD displays - let the world burn in gpu heat)

More to come! :)