Puzzler - A Language for Puzzle Games

[Alex Owens]

Hello everyone!

My name is Alex Owens and I've been a lurker on this mailing list - and in the Racket community in general - for a while. While I'm still relatively new to Racket, I wanted to share a project I worked on called Puzzler.

Puzzler is a DSL to enable easy creation of 2D grid-based puzzle games. It features a very concise and readable syntax for representing puzzle games through a small collection of built-in constructs like win/lose conditions and entity interactions. Most of the actual work for Puzzler was done about a year ago at the end of my undergrad, and while I'm not planning any big new features soon, I have recently been cleaning up the implementation and adding documentation.

Mostly I hope that if you're interested in language-oriented programming for game development you will check it out. It is a small language, but even if it doesn't suit all of your needs you may find it a useful reference project for what a language for puzzle game development might look like! If you do decide to use Puzzler and you find any bugs or functionality you think is missing, feel free to submit an issue (or better yet a pull request) on my GitHub. I can't promise I'll fix things immediately, but I will try my best to respond in a timely fashion - I'm always up to learn more Racket. Of course, you are also free to clone/fork it and build onto it however you see fit.

Puzzler on the package catalog: https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/package/puzzler
Source code: https://github.com/aowens-21/puzzler

Stay safe and healthy, and I look forward to getting to know you all and being more active here in the future!

- Alex

[Jack Firth]

Wow this is really, really cool. It reminds me a lot of Baba Is You.

[unlimitedscolobb]

Hi Alex,

Sounds really interesting!  I'm not into puzzle games myself, but I have some friends who could definitely be excited.

I shared it on the Fediverse: https://bidule.menf.in/notice/9uKmWBX2f0i52XqwF6

-

Sergiu