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0 pointsp_l4y ago0 comments

Regarding Kandria:

You might have heard of this thing called "Art", and that it has styles, and that not only one of them is called "pixel art" for celebrating that kind of limitations, Art as a whole is often talked in terms of self-imposed limits used in creation of a work.

That said, a game can deliberately target such style, and yet hide considerable richness of implementation (consider: Noita, Dwarf Fortress).

Another thing with Shinmera and his team is that they produce both interesting stories, interesting games, but also code I'd argue is art too.

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jodrellblank4y ago· 1 in thread

> "That said, a game can deliberately target such style, and yet hide considerable richness of implementation (consider: Noita, Dwarf Fortress)."

It definitely can, and Monkey Island and other SCUMMVM games are examples of having lots of gameplay and comedy, despite constrained graphics. As are card games and board games, for that matter. Fancy 3D isn't the be-all, end-all. In more recent years SpeedRunner[1] isn't pixel art but it's quite simply styled, and is fun for leaning so heavily on a single game mechanic.

I'm not meaning to diss Kandria which might very well be a great game. I meant to call out the gulf between Lisp as "the best language" and "superlative applications" being developed with it then linking to Kandria might set one up to think of the "best games" of recent years, by popularity or profitability or ambitiousness or multiplayability, or replayability, or storyline, or VR support, e.g. Pokemon Go, Grand Theft Auto series, Dark Souls series, Fortnite, Fifa, Half Life Alyx, Tony Hawks Pro Skater remakes, Spiderman PS5, Elite Dangerous, Roblox and Minecraft, Final Fantasy series. Which all seem to have done alright without Lisp, and no game development houses have done the Paul Graham "Lisp as secret weapon" to make a game nobody else can make with other tools.

[1] https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/58020036161797293...

p_lOP4y ago

Well, the end effect was that your post seemed to concentrate on dissing Kandria, not the way the article went about it (which wasn't the best honestly).

As for games where Lisp was secret sauce, Uncharted series would count, I think ;) It was a return to GOOL-style programming (like in Crash Bandicoot) instead of full engine written in Lisp (like GOAL was for Jak&Dexter), however for narrative-heavy game the tooling used for making that narrative should count as secret weapon.

BTW, a huge underappreciated thing about why Kandria can't fit into less RAM is simple fact that today games generally render at much higher resolutions, and I believe Kandria does have multiple buffers and passes involved (like most game rendering engines these days, though I will have to read Shinmera's paper about shader composition system to verify)

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