Introduction to Arcadia: Live Functional Programming for Video Games

Arcadia brings the full power and interactive immediacy of performant live functional programming to the Unity game engine and development platform. Unity is the industry-standard tool for building professional-quality video games. Clojure is an advanced, deeply expressive functional programming language. Arcadia is their integration, yielding a uniquely fluid, immersive game development experience.

This workshop will provide developers with everything they need to start making games in Arcadia.

We will cover:

• Setting up Arcadia in a new or existing Unity project
• Injecting a live Clojure REPL into a running game
• Manipulating the Unity editor programmatically
• Using Arcadia to inspect and debug existing Unity code
• Working basics of the Unity model, and its relationship to Clojure
• Dependency management for sharing libraries
• Export to desktop games
• Time permitting, a demo of live programming in virtual reality with the Oculus Rift

Prerequisites:

• Basic knowledge of elementary functional programming ideas (eg map, filter, reduce)