welcome! 👋

So back in October 2024, I started working on a new project. I haven’t posted anything in a while, so I figured that I could share the progress I’ve made so far - going over the initial prototype, what some of the challenges have been this far, and what I plan to do next. What’s the game? The game is supposed to be a sokoban-like puzzle game. You control a duck that can push boxes around a grid-based map, where the goal is to push boxes into their designated spots. But wait, there’s more! The idea is to incorporate a bunch of different mechanics that make the otherwise simple box-pushing gameplay more interesting. The main mechanic that most other mechanics will build on is that boxes of the same color stick together and then move as a single unit (remember that word). ...

In my previous post, I showed how I wanted to transpile my C# lambdas to GLSL shaders in my rendering engine. I created a library, InspecTree, which gives you access to the entire syntax tree of a lambda, statement bodies and all. This was a great start, but I quickly realized that I would want more than just the syntax tree. I would also want to know the types of the variables, the return type of the lambda, which methods that were being called inside the lambda, and more specifically check if a lambda is capturing one or more variables from an outer scope (more on why this would be a problem later). ...

What’s Tiled? Tiled is a popular open source map editor for 2D games. It supports several file export formats, often times even specialized ones for specific game engines. I recommend you check it out if you haven’t already. It’s a great tool for creating 2D maps for your games and then exporting them in a format like JSON or XML to be used in your game engine of choice. The problem In my never-ending game development journey, I’ve used Tiled for several projects. I’ve therefore also used many of the existing libraries for parsing Tiled maps in my .NET projects. However, a lot of these libraries seem to lack in the features that they support, or they are outdated and no longer maintained, or lack in documentation making them difficult to use. ...

What’s an Expression<T>? I strongly suggest you refer to the official documentation for a more in-depth explanation, but in short, an Expression<T> is a type in C# that will give you access to a supplied lambda expression as a syntax-tree-like object. This expression tree can then be traversed and inspected, and you can do all sorts of cool things with it, e.g. transpile it to another language, or even execute it. ...

Well, here we are. My first post. I don’t know how often I’ll make these, but it feels like fun. I have a few ideas of things I want to write about, so expect posts in a near future.