Paku Waka

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

This was my first foray into small game development. I decided to make some things easier, and add restrictions to other things. These were the rules when I started.

• Paku paku is a lot of fun. I am copying recreating it, and the game should have no more scope than that.
• The game should be written in five one-hour sprints.
• For the first four hours, I am only allowed to compile the code during the last ten minutes. The rest of the time I must rely on LSPs.

I wanted it to work both on my desktop and in a browser and to be close to the metal, so I picked rust to write the game in with a small shim in JavaScript to load the WASM module and run it. The front-end is minifb on desktops and a HTML <canvas/> object in the browser.

The web setup doesn’t use a bundler or any additional files other than the JS on this page and 15kb of compiled WASM.¹ The game library itself comes in at just shy of 500LoC, about half of which are concerned with rendering. Its not good code, because it was written on a time-budget², but its done and that is good enough.