Swarm: a lot can happen in a week

It’s been about a week since I put out an announcement and call for collaboration on a new game, Swarm. Since then, the response has been fantastic: lots of people have tried it out, a few have even streamed themselves playing it on Twitch, and there has been lots of development activity.

• 39 new issues opened
• 27 pull requests merged
• Lots of great discussion on GitHub issues as well as on IRC

There’s still a long, long way to go before the game comes anywhere close to the vision for it, but we’ve made great progress! Some notable new features added since the initial announcement include:

• New scan, upload, and install commands

• Semicolons are no longer required beetween consecutive defs

• Basic help panel, and panel shortcut keys

• Dramatically reduced CPU usage when idle

• An overhaul of parsing and pretty-printing of constants (makes adding new constants easier, and an important prerequisite for saving definitions and games)

• Better handling of water (you can make curry now)!

  

A couple more exciting things in progress that should land very soon:

• ASCII art recipes

  

• Basic editor integration via LSP, so you can write Swarm programs in your favorite editor with automatically highlighted syntax and type errors.

And of course there are many other exciting things planned or in the works. Come join us!

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