trivial-gamekit VS Arcadia

If you insist on learning through game development -- and admittedly I learn best by just jumping in and doing something -- you should at least try making something simpler than a full 3D game first, like a roguelike: https://github.com/borodust/trivial-gamekit, https://borodust.org/projects/trivial-gamekit/.

For something simple, https://github.com/borodust/trivial-gamekit would do.

Playing with their 'trivial-gamekit' based on cl-bodge now, very nice I think!

https://borodust.org/projects/trivial-gamekit/

alien-works also looks cool and under active development

If all else fails, I recommend trying to contact author through creating an issue on github. If that fails too and you are too tired to continue that fight, have a look at trivial-gamekit (beware: shameful self-plug).

Learn Common Lisp and high-level 2D graphics using Sketch or trivial-gamekit. It's lispy, super fun and enjoyable way. Seriously. 2D graphics are easy to grasp and intuitive.

If ECS gets too boiler-platey for my liking I might try some of the "don't use MonoBehaviours" approaches people have suggested, perhaps with F# bundled into a .dll. I also saw that some mad scientists had bridged the gap between Clojure and Unity via a framework called Arcadia - we'll see!

arcadia adds clojure (a lisp) to unity as a scripting language. You get to use a very good and well documented 3d game engine while still scripting stuff in your game in a lisp. there's a godot version too. The blender>unity/godot pipeline is pretty easy and documented. However, these game engines themselves are a lot to learn for your first game, especially if you're doing unorthodox stuff with them such as using lisp you won't find many tutorials.

Nowadays, Clojure can be used for this sort of stuff. Arcadia has been used to make real world games. Lead developer gave a talk about it a few years ago.

Clojure started out on the CLR before the decision was made to focus on the JVM instead, and some people still maintain an unofficial ClojureCLR port. Some people used that to make Arcadia, which builds on ClojureCLR to make it work in Unity. Here's an old video of someone Clojure's REPL-driven development to make on-the-fly scene changes, kind of cool.

Arcadia uses ClojureCLR to work with Clojure in unity. Also Godot engine version.

My understanding is that the Clojure community points everyone to Arcadia[0] since it's maintained and a bit more public about what their exact goals are. Unfortunately, neither are terribly well documented and so I've not personally used either

[0]: https://github.com/arcadia-unity/arcadia