racket-examples

A set of example Racket games and demos that I created on my journey learning Racket. They use the How to Design Programs framework and demonstrate sprites, worlds, animation and game logic.

My starting place for learning Racket was the books: Realm of Racket http://www.realmofracket.com/, The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/little-schemer-fourth-edition

After that I created a set of games / demos (which you'll find in this repo), to help me prove I understood the principles and explore the language further. The games are pretty basic, but hopefully interesting to explore.

If you find these examples useful feel free to leave suggestions on the issues page, or email me comments.

Some thoughts on Racket:

• I found each game pretty hard to write (my background is Python and other procedural languages) but once complete, surprising low in defects.
• After getting over the lack of objects I found the functional approach produced a simpler design.
• When making a game do objects and mutable state better model what's going on?

Contents:

• asteroids -- a simple arcade game.

• boids -- bird like objects that flock together.

• boulder -- a take on Boulder Dash.

• learn-music -- learn to read music with the guitar. Read more on my blog: http://ericclack.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/learn-to-read-music-with-racket-scheme.html

• learn-music-phrase -- like learn-music but presents sequences of notes to practice.

• stars -- experiments with very basic 3d graphics, including stars and aliens with random 3d paths.

• thrust -- a take on the game Thrust from 1986.

Many of the app filenames have numbers, these indicate major changes -- so it's easy to look back at previous, simpler versions.