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Hey folks! Even though HN is more hacker-oriented, I still thought I'd give it a shot. Factoids: - It's the first commercial game fully made in ooc - It's

Hey folks! Even though HN is more hacker-oriented, I still thought I'd give it a shot. Factoids: - It's the first commercial game fully made in ooc - It's sold only on itch.io (which recently made HN frontpage) - It was originally a Ludum Dare submission - We just released a Christmas update! - It's lame because the game is not about killing stuff! I have no idea how this post will do, but I'll happily take your questions here. Thanks for your attention and happy holidays :)

mhlakhani 13y ago
By ooc, do you mean the programming language? [1] if so, can you share any thoughts on how that affected the development process? Any quirks? Any features that made it much easier? Thanks! [1] http://ooc-lang.org/ http://ooc-lang.org/
- nddrylliog 13y ago
  Precisely! Well, it's interesting that ooc returned to its roots, because when I first started working on it, it was for a small simulation game project at university. I'll try to be as unbiased as can be, though. Here are the reasons I liked writing it in ooc: - I find it hard to write bad ooc. The language is smart, but not too smart, so you can write code that's concise yet not too confusing. - Moving up from C, having a single tool manage the build of your whole project is really cool. I recently added cross-compilation support, so I produce the Windows, Mac, Linux 32-bit & 64-bit builds from the same machine. I have a simple Makefile for tasks like packaging so releasing a new build is a 'make deploy' away! - Recent versions of rock have gotten relatively good at error checking (there's still plenty of room for improvement), but it's often a lot more helpful than well, most compilers I've seen. (Clang isn't bad, but it's C, so it can only help you on a low-signal level). - Most of the libs I wanted to use (SDL2, SDL2_mixer, OpenGL 3.x) already had bindings, and for the others (stb_image, etc.), well, I wrote'em. It's usually a matter of neatly organizing C functions into an object-oriented-ish interface. I'm not trying to sell the language here so I'll stop, but mostly - for this project, after 5 years spent working on and off on the language (and peripheral projects), it got out of the way. I could just write what I thought and it worked. From what I gather, it's a rare satisfaction in the software craftsmanship realm :) As for the downsides, well, there are things I know to work around, language features I know I'd better avoid, and the occasional compiler blips. But for a project of that scope, I got away with "using my toy language" relatively scot-free! I still remember the very harsh comments when I first presented ooc to HN a few years back. Forunately I was in a high at that point so I didn't care. Had I listened to them, I would never have gotten where I am now. So: stay positive, everyone!
- sp332 13y ago
  Not to be confused with Ook! http://esolangs.org/wiki/Ook http://esolangs.org/wiki/Ook!

mhlakhani 13y ago

By ooc, do you mean the programming language? [1] if so, can you share any thoughts on how that affected the development process? Any quirks? Any features that made it much easier? Thanks! [1] http://ooc-lang.org/ http://ooc-lang.org/

nddrylliog 13y ago
Precisely! Well, it's interesting that ooc returned to its roots, because when I first started working on it, it was for a small simulation game project at university. I'll try to be as unbiased as can be, though. Here are the reasons I liked writing it in ooc: - I find it hard to write bad ooc. The language is smart, but not too smart, so you can write code that's concise yet not too confusing. - Moving up from C, having a single tool manage the build of your whole project is really cool. I recently added cross-compilation support, so I produce the Windows, Mac, Linux 32-bit & 64-bit builds from the same machine. I have a simple Makefile for tasks like packaging so releasing a new build is a 'make deploy' away! - Recent versions of rock have gotten relatively good at error checking (there's still plenty of room for improvement), but it's often a lot more helpful than well, most compilers I've seen. (Clang isn't bad, but it's C, so it can only help you on a low-signal level). - Most of the libs I wanted to use (SDL2, SDL2_mixer, OpenGL 3.x) already had bindings, and for the others (stb_image, etc.), well, I wrote'em. It's usually a matter of neatly organizing C functions into an object-oriented-ish interface. I'm not trying to sell the language here so I'll stop, but mostly - for this project, after 5 years spent working on and off on the language (and peripheral projects), it got out of the way. I could just write what I thought and it worked. From what I gather, it's a rare satisfaction in the software craftsmanship realm :) As for the downsides, well, there are things I know to work around, language features I know I'd better avoid, and the occasional compiler blips. But for a project of that scope, I got away with "using my toy language" relatively scot-free! I still remember the very harsh comments when I first presented ooc to HN a few years back. Forunately I was in a high at that point so I didn't care. Had I listened to them, I would never have gotten where I am now. So: stay positive, everyone!
sp332 13y ago
Not to be confused with Ook! http://esolangs.org/wiki/Ook http://esolangs.org/wiki/Ook!