[HN Gopher] Making a game on a custom bytecode VM in 7 days and 3kB
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Making a game on a custom bytecode VM in 7 days and 3kB
Author : laurentlb
Score : 69 points
Date : 2025-12-19 13:00 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (laurent.le-brun.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (laurent.le-brun.eu)
| nsxwolf wrote:
| What's that overall filter that covers the view? Is it supposed
| to look like a late 80s passive matrix color LCD screen?
|
| Edit: Thanks for the downvote, guess I shouldn't have paid any
| attention to this post at all?
| macintux wrote:
| Worth noting that it's easy (and probably fairly frequent) to
| click the wrong arrow, especially on a phone screen. I've
| started double-checking the "unvote" vs "undown" link that
| appears afterwards to make sure I hit the right one.
| somat wrote:
| So that's how you tell, salutes. Sometimes I worry that I
| inadvertently downvoted someone by mistake. "But you can just
| unvote if that happens" sure but how do you tell what was
| voted.
|
| Anyhow, I think if this was my forum I would put the downvote
| selector at the end of the comment title and have the upvote
| selector at the beginning.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Such a beautiful technique for shoehorning straight out of the
| 1970s! See also
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8
|
| and
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16
|
| It seems so un-FORTRAN that DEC had a FORTRAN compiler for the
| PDP-11. that was based on a stack machine and then later built an
| FP accelerator specialized to accelerate the stack machine. It
| was a straggler but I'm still trying to track down a circa 1992
| article from _Dr. Dobb 's Journal_ where someone used virtual
| machine techniques to unbreak the broken i860 and make a good
| FORTRAN compiler.
| jstrieb wrote:
| The rest of the games submitted to this very interesting,
| somewhat niche game jam (including my own entry) are here:
|
| https://itch.io/jam/langjamgamejam/entries
|
| There were some really impressive submissions in spite of the
| short time frame!
| azhenley wrote:
| The jam was originally going to be just me doing a solo project
| but it grew much larger! Over 200 people joined the Discord.
|
| We plan on running it again: https://langjamgamejam.com/
| jstrieb wrote:
| Maybe I missed it, but I didn't notice a submission of yours
| in the jam. Did you end up getting around to doing your solo
| project?
| reidrac wrote:
| _Dungeon-Specific Language (DSL)_
|
| Cheff kiss!
| vegabook wrote:
| It's incredibly satisfying to see the polar opposite of the usual
| LLM/superDB/K8/CICD/Cloud/Container/Crapola corpobloat we hear
| about on this site all the time, namely a tiny piece of
| handcrafted code, ironically produce something infinitely more
| aesthetically beautiful, and intellectually interesting from an
| almost artisan engineering perspective.
| llmslave2 wrote:
| Especially because some framework slopper using all the LLM's
| and bloat in the world could never even imagine reaching this
| level of productivity. In 7 (SEVEN) days this coder
|
| - Designed a language.
|
| - Implemented a compiler to compile it to bytecode, using F#.
|
| - Wrote a bytecode interpreter, using C++.
|
| - Created a shoot'em up game, using the custom language.
|
| - Renderd the graphics, using a single GLSL shader.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| Reminds me of https://js13kgames.com/ where people managed to do
| a whole air sim in 13kb (out of many other things)
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(page generated 2025-12-24 23:00 UTC)