Just in time, I managed to iron out the last few big bugs in my submission, NanoTanks.

NanoTanks is a programming game, which pits your wits as a programmer against the wiles of the computer. You write an AI for a tank in a tiny language (inspired by Scheme), and watch as it takes control of your tiny tank and battles it out with another inside the tiniest of worlds – a computer’s CPU. Programming games are, to me, the ultimate sandbox. A programming language grants more flexibility and freedom than any other form of game controls, but also add complexity. I hope I’ve managed to find the right balance between fun and flexibility.

I used Java for this one, with JOGL for OpenGL bindings. I also used JUnit and FindBugs during development, and wrote all the code in Eclipse. The interpreter was entirely built from scratch, with a little inspiration from the dragon book and SICP. I spent so much time on the language implementation (a tiny Scheme-inspired language), that I really had to rush to create a game around it. I completely ran out of time before implementing real graphics, or any sound or music, or even a slick UI. It’s much less than I wanted it to be. Still, I’m very happy with the results of my first LD48, and am proud of what I managed to put together.

I hope it finds some love, but even if it doesn’t, I still had a lot of fun. Doesn’t matter. Wrote code.