After reading the story I just have to recall stories from the guys who flew and serviced F4s, they joked they could fly without either wing simply because it was just a rocket sled.<p>We had one guy knicknamed Major Cablecutter as he "clipped" the guidelines of a radio tower one time. He also had come back more than once with branches stuck to his F4. Being that they were only "Recon" they tended to be aggressive during war games and this game guy over stressed his airframe turning into some F18s trying to tag him.<p>So many military planes have such high thrust to weight ratios I do not doubt that wings merely become the means to stable flight
I'm the author. I wrote the game and engine using the wonderful, and fast, Gambit Scheme (<a href="http://gambitscheme.org/" rel="nofollow">http://gambitscheme.org/</a>).<p>I needed a lisp to manipulate the puzzles, because they aren't based in a strict grid. It ended up being way more natural to program the block structures as lists rather than traditional matrices.<p>Gambit compiles the Scheme code down to C, which I can then link to Objective-C for iOS, or port to Android or any other platform that Gambit supports.
Awesome work! I'm continually blown away that people still reference my old work on porting Gambit Scheme for iOS.<p>Almost makes me want to play around with it again. :)
The Gambit interpreter (REPL) itself also runs on the iPhone<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gambit-repl/id434534076?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gambit-repl/id434534076?mt=8</a><p>and on the Android platform (updating it with the latest version of Gambit is on my todo list):<p><a href="http://apps.keithflower.org/?page_id=152" rel="nofollow">http://apps.keithflower.org/?page_id=152</a><p><a href="http://apps.keithflower.org/?p=223" rel="nofollow">http://apps.keithflower.org/?p=223</a><p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.keithflower.gambit" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.keithflowe...</a><p>Note that this is just the interpreter itself - not a very good way of writing games for Android.
Well done! Gameplay video link: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T11wl70wjc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T11wl70wjc</a>
Good stuff. Interestingly, the very first programming language offered in introductory CS class at my college was Scheme at the time (2000). The power of 'car' and 'cdr' still resonates in my head. At times, the parenthesis used to give me dyslexia but good old days of doing stuff like:<p><pre><code> (car(cdr(car(cdr(cdr a)))))</code></pre>
Great work! :) Congratulations!
For those who want to try developing in Scheme, I'm working on a project that could help you get started. Currently only Android is available, but as soon as possible iOS will be as well. <a href="http://schemespheres.org" rel="nofollow">http://schemespheres.org</a>
I love the originality on display with this game mechanic. Too many "samesies" games out there for my tastes.<p>This developer has another puzzler in the App Store as well: Button Brigade, also quite original, but more of an adventure style puzzle game.<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/button-brigade/id542991688?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/button-brigade/id542991688?m...</a><p><a href="http://asivitz.com/button_brigade/index" rel="nofollow">http://asivitz.com/button_brigade/index</a>
Dear rrradical,<p>Tried your game, was not disappointed. :-) It's almost spooky that your post came at this time, for I have read a lot about Scheme->C systems this week. This PDF made a great impression on me of the gambit scheme system. <a href="http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/Gambit-inside-out.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/Gambit-inside-out.pdf</a><p>I have a few questions for you:<p>1. I installed Gambit-Scheme via Brew and compiling any scheme file results in a clang segfault. How did you get around this? For now I use gcc instead. :-/<p>2. Why Gambit-Scheme and not Chicken-Scheme? I can't really decide which is the better choice for writing a game.<p>3. Do you use continuations to make coroutines in your game?
Somewhere, deep in Lindley Hall at Indiana University, is an old professor exclaiming, "I told them people used it!"<p>I wonder if I'd have taken more to Scheme if I were learning it now. At the time, I was double majoring CS and Telecom, but the world of open source hadn't been as friendly to Mac as it is now, and Macs were a prereq for TCom. Getting Scheme running on my old iBook was a pain in the ass, let alone the assignments (which still didn't match the untouchable stability of our automated grading system). I conceptually understood why I needed to learn it, and even grasped many of the concepts of what I was learning, but it wasn't the language for me.
I play around with this a bit, a few things I learned is that XCode 5.0's llvm crashes when compiling Gambit-C 4.7.0's generated C code. The beta for 5.1 has a fix. Here are a few demos that might help a few people:<p>scheme REPL over TCP using chibi scheme: <a href="https://github.com/clarkeaa/Scheme_iOS_REPL" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/clarkeaa/Scheme_iOS_REPL</a><p>calling in and out of Gambit-C:
<a href="https://github.com/clarkeaa/HelloGambit" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/clarkeaa/HelloGambit</a><p>You can grab a precompiled Gambit-C library from the later project if you want.
I just downloaded the game. Very cool! I wish I has written it... oh wait... given that I wrote Gambit, in a sense I wrote most of the game! It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling!<p>Your in game REPL is neat. For developing games, where there's a need to explore variations quickly, it is a powerful tool. I'm currently working on a remote REPL for Gambit-JS, so that you can remotely debug Scheme code (possibly games) running in the browser.
It's truly inspiring to see a project like this completed. I've been wanting to combine mobile (specifically Android) and some sort of Lisp dialect for a while.<p>Am I interpreting correctly from some of the other components that doing the programming in a language-once-removed (ie Scheme instead of Obj-C) opens an easier path to compiling for both iOS and Android?
Very cool! I always like seeing when something is built using a typically non-traditional language for the environment. I downloaded the game to see how well it performed, and I gotta say, it's a lot of fun. Great job!
Wow, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I would pay for a good series of tutorials or an ebook on this topic maybe implementing something well known like Tetris etc.