I'm in LÖVE
Just kidding, I'm not writing my 7DRL Challenge game in Go. Nothing against Go, though. After playing with a Zig/C setup for a while, I decided I just wasn't comfortable enough with it.
Ultimately, I decided to use LÖVE. LÖVE is SDL and C++ under the hood, but you don't need to mess with that. You get to script your whole game with Lua, specifically LuaJIT.
Lua is a fairly simple language to learn. If you know JavaScript, you'll find its syntax a little clunky and run into issues with its 1-indexed arrays, which it calls "tables", but otherwise its pretty easy to get used to.
The reason I picked LÖVE is just that I'm comfortable with it. I've used it in all of the (few) game jams I've done in the last fifteen years. The language is easy to work with. The docs are good. Distributing LÖVE games is easy.
In anticipation for the challenge, I built a basic skeleton project. I've got GitHub Actions running tests and automatically packaging up a cross-platform .love file, as well as executables for Windows and Mac. Packaging is something I didn't want to have to worry about during the challenge.
I got Lua's LSP set up. I got a test framework set up. I even built out a simple ECS. I was really trying to not do that, but tiny-ecs didn't quite fit the architecture I like. My custom ECS is probably slower and worse in some ways, but it'll avoid me trying to shim things into a system that's not meant to work the way I expect.
As for my game idea, I'm still working on that. I had an idea of building a relatively traditional game with a deck-building system, but I'm torn on that. Deck-building is trendy and I'd love to do something that stands out a bit more. We'll see.
Don't expect a Skill Issue next week. I'll be deep in the challenge, heads down coding. The following week I'll do a postmortem and provide links to play the game.
I've been working through To The Teeth's List of Lists, catching all the music I missed. To The Teeth is a Dutch music journalist who aggregates all the "best albums of the year" lists from major reviewers into a single list of the best albums of the year.
Blood Incantation (deservedly) took first place, so if you like death metal and haven't given their record a listen, go check it out.
I'm going to recommend something deeper into the list, though. Check out The Body & Dis Fig's Orchards of a Futile Heaven. It's noisy, chaotic, and beautiful. Truly something different.