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[xando]

I’m going to write a game, a clone of a game that I played and liked few years ago.

The game is called Herbert (I think) and it was done Brian Conte from http://www.wildnoodle.com/. You can read about it more here http://www.wildnoodle.com/the-story-about-a-box-programming-the-perfect-square. At some point was used as a Imagine Cup Challenge. It was great fun.

I would like to keep this game in model where you get 1,2 or 3 stars, puzzle game. The model present in "Cut the Rope" and "Kingdom rush", and many others.

Few things before I really start:
- I am a programmer, I’ve been doing this for quite few years. I did many things, most of them what people would call web programming.
- I have a limited experience in writing language interpreters.
- I always wanted to write games.
- I'm going to use and learn Unity3D.
- This might take me anything between few weeks to few years.

This is not first attempt for me to write this game, I’ve tried this few times. But this was mostly prototypes to play with things, and this was done using web stuff tech.

This where I got last time using javascript



The language implementation is the first thing I would like to cover. The language spec and (partial) Python implementation is here, now need to convert this to C#.
https://github.com/xando/herbert/blob/master/README.md

[xando]

It looks like I have the very first version of interpreter running. It still has some issues. But most of the original spec of the h (herbert language) is covered. The full design spec is here and more.

I’m not super happy with some aspects of errors messages. But this will come later as a part of game design I think.

The editor, and from now on rest of the game will be available under

http://herbert.surge.sh/

(surge looks like super friendly place for things like this, I’ve tried neocities but had some issues with uploading .asm.jsgz files)

Some code to test

Code:

a(A):sa(A-1)
b:a(10)rb
b

Code:

a(A):sa(A-1)
b(B):a(10)rb(B-1)
b(4)

Editor Issues:
- copy past isn't working, probably Unity3D related
- fonts are not super sharp, probably Unity3D rendering related

Language Issues:
I didn't want to question language design from the beginning. Decided to implemented it as it was. But I have some things that I don't like at this point.

- how the "numeric" arguments are being handled the same way as "step" arguments.
- Also I can't how "+" operation can be useful, I couldn't find valid usecase.

But this could be super hard too really explain without having at least the minimal version of the gameplay. So I'm going with the original language design for now.