GitHub Repo: github.com/ArcadeMakerSources/ArcadeMaker
(first of all, i want to say that I made this project for fun and challenge. I always wanted to create my own language. This has no business goal or something.)
So the project is a 2D game engine (MonoGame backend) inspired by GameMaker 8. It includes its own IDE (built with WinForms) and an interpreted programming language that I wrote myself.
The language - definitely the biggest challenge in the project - is a simple dynamically typed language. When I started, I had zero knowledge of how to build something like this. I didn’t even know I was making an interpreter; at first I called it a compiler. It was a personal challenge, and I wanted to figure everything out without using any resources or tutorials. My mindset was basically: "I need to write software that takes a text file containing code and just does what it says."
Somehow, I made it work. In the beginning, running an empty loop counting to 1M took 7 seconds. After a lot of performance work and rebuilding parts of the system, the same machine can now run a 30M loop in 2–3 seconds. Pretty nice improvement.
The language itself is a bit unusual, and I want to share one small feature I really like: loop counters.
foreach item in ['a', 'b', 'c'] : counter c
{
println(c + ": " + item)
}
// Output:
// 0: a
// 1: b
// 2: c
Not a complicated feature, but pretty useful.
Anyway, these days I barely have time to work on the project, so I decided to open-source it. I’m hoping people here will find it interesting and help turn it into something real. If you're looking for cool projects to contribute to, that's it.
Would love to get some feedback.🙂