Elemental

The simple ClojureScript game setup

Rationale

I setup an experimental snake game at https://escherize.com/#/post/2 and had a few nicepeople ask me how I set it up, so I am going ahead and documenting the process here.

Installing

git clone https://github.com/escherize/elemental.git
cd elemental
npm install react react-dom react-create-class

Development

shadow-cljs watch :app

Open http://localhost:8700 and once its done compiling you should see you game. It will update as you update the code!

Emacs

If you use cider, you can jack-in and you will be greeted with the shadow.user namespace.

shadow.user> (shadow/watch :app)
[:app] Configuring build.
[:app] Compiling ...
[:app] Build completed. (185 files, 1 compiled, 0 warnings, 5.62s)
:watching
shadow.user> (shadow/repl :app)
To quit, type: :cljs/quit
[:selected :app]
cljs.user>

At this point you are connected to the clojurescript process in the browser.

So you can do interesting things like:

(js/alert "hi")

Archetecture discussion

The basic idea of the setup is:

• App DB - (a map with the entire application state)
• draw-state - simple component that watches the App DB and reactively displays the game
• game loop - runs at fps times per second
• update-state - simple function called in the game loop to update the App DB

Release

shadow-cljs release :app

you can host or publish the /public directory

License

Copyright © 2019 Bryan Maass

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License either version 1.0 or (at your option) any later version.