This October, several teams and individuals gathered online to create sixteen games over the course of ten days for the biannual Lisp Game Jam. The earliest recorded instance of the jam took place in 2010, then intermittently in the years that followed, before landing on a more semi-annual basis starting in 2016.
This year, two of the entries, Cybersol by David Wilson and Strigoform by Spritely’s own Dave Thompson, leveraged Hoot, our open-source Wasm toolkit to enable Scheme in the browser. What follows is an interview with the two devs on how it felt to participate in the jam this year, as well as their experiences with Hoot.
Note: Interviews have been lightly formatted
How did you come to learn about the jam?
David Wilson
I’ve known about the Lisp Game Jam for years now and have tried participating a couple of other times but never submitted an entry. Since Hoot released 0.1.0 practically a week before the jam, it seemed like an excellent opportunity to participate and experiment with the toolchain.
Dave Thompson
I had become friends with one of the former jam hosts, David O’Toole (dto), via the #lispgames IRC channel. It turned out that dto and I live very close to each other and even went to the same college (though not concurrently), and through that connection I got more involved in hobby game development with Lisp, using Guile Scheme as my Lisp of choice. I submitted my first game to the jam that happened soon after: Spring 2016 Lisp Game Jam.
I try to participate in every jam, but most of the time I don’t submit anything. Finishing stuff is hard!
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