Proc Skater 2016

This is a ProcJam project that stands out to me for a couple of reasons.

First off, it’s one of the early projects to use WaveFunctionCollapse to build its skatepark map. The map is generated based on your skater’s name (which can also be randomly generated) so to get back to the same map you just need to enter the same name.

Secondly, while it uses Unity as an engine, it’s written in Clojure via the Arcadia plugin. I’ve got a long-standing interest Clojure and other Lisp dialects, partially because I find Lisp uniquely suited to programming generative things. Since Lisp doesn’t have a divide between code and data—code is data—it makes it comparatively easy to write code that generates code. Clojure, with its extensive support of immutable functional programing further lends itself to my preferred ways to make generators. Which is one of the reasons why I’ve written two novel generators in Clojure.

Of course, there’s not as much of a support ecosystem for Clojure as there is for, say, C#, which is why I’m happy to see projects like the Arcadia plugin.

Made by Joseph Parker and Ryan Jones, with gamepad support by Oscar Morante, Proc Skater 2016 is not perfect. The physics can sometimes be a bit glitchy:

Also, I’m bad at skateboarding. Though I did manage to pull off a few (procedurally named!) tricks:

ProcSkater2016 is available as pay-what-you-want from https://arcadia-clojure.itch.io/proc-skater-2016, with all proceeds being donated to the anti-hate crime Southern Poverty Law Center.