#puddlelang

puddlelang is finished! You can download it on itch.io here. 

This is the esolang I mentioned I was working on in the last blog post. I’m quite proud of it, and feel like it turned out pretty well considering I only spent a couple days working on it. There’s more that could be added to it, but at this point I need to get back to our main project. 

The whole  reason for trying to make puddlelang was a proof of concept to see if it had some gameplay application. Having finished it, I do think there’s some ways we could work it into our next game--though I would probably tweak the language a bit to simplify how it’s used. The good part is that the way I wrote the parser, I can easily modify the functions it handles to support however we decide to use it in a game. 

The language is extremely bare-bones, and it’s complicated to perform even the simplest of tasks...which is the point of esolangs. It actually felt good to work on something that isn’t meant to be user friendly for a change. Which is also probably why I was able to finish it in two days.

Here are the functions that the language supports. My goal was to keep the final function count at 10 or fewer.

Here’s an example of a nested for loop where both loops run twice--causing the inner loop to run 4 times:

The code is on the left side of the screen. When running in real-time mode, you can see the results of your code on the right side of the screen--each cell in the grid represents a block of memory.

You can also print the output of your program, which will display in the bottom portion of the screen.

The language is ascii based - so if you wanted to write a program that prints out text, for instance the letter ‘M’, you would have to make the cell you are telling the program to print equal to 77. You could just enter a bunch of plus signs into a single cell to make it equal 77, then print it. But the fun is in trying to optimize that operation to make the code as efficient as possible.

So yeah... that’s it. I don’t expect many people to actually try it. But if you do, hit me up on Twitter to let me know what you made.

As a side note, I first heard about esolangs last Friday (a week ago today), started brainstorming my own esolang that night/Saturday, started coding it on Sunday and by mid-day Tuesday I had it wrapped up. That’s what happens when my brain becomes fascinated with something :P

Anyway, thanks for reading!