jme-clj

A Clojure wrapper library for jMonkeyEngine. jMonkeyEngine is a 3D game engine for adventurous Java developers (now Clojure developers). It is open-source, cross-platform, and cutting-edge. Please check jMonkeyEngine Wiki if you would like to learn more about the engine, highly recommended! Also, there is jMonkeyEngine Hub that you can ask/search for questions, the community is very responsive and friendly.

The engine is used by several commercial game studios and computer-science courses. Here’s a taste:

Justification

The best thing about making a game in Clojure is that you can modify it in a REPL while it’s running. By simply reloading a namespace, your code will be injected into the game, uninhibited by the restrictions posed by tools like HotSwap. Additionally, a REPL lets you read and modify the state of your game at runtime, so you can quickly experiment and diagnose problems.

Clojure also brings the benefits of functional programming. This is becoming a big topic of discussion in gamedev circles, including by John Carmack. Part of this is due to the prevalence of multi-core hardware, making concurrency more important. Additionally, there is a general difficulty of maintaining object-oriented game codebases as they grow, due to complicated class hierarchies and state mutations.

It is from Zach Oakes’s play-clj library. This summarises the delicacy of the situation perfectly.

Recommended Learning Path

• REPL Based Tutorial
• Hello SimpleApplication
• Hello Node
• Hello Asset
• Hello Update Loop
• Hello Input System
• Hello Material
• Hello Animation
• Hello Picking
• Hello Collision
• Hello Terrain
• Hello Audio
• Hello Effects
• Hello Physics

Demo Video