Phase 0: First Contact

Not public yet. This page links to b12n-cljsapp, which is still private, so those links will 404 for now. They're being opened up as the course progresses, and this note goes away when they are. The three raylib suites the rest of the course is built on (clj, jlt, jnk) are public today.

Watch it work first

Before installing anything: clone and run the example games locally to see what you're building toward:

git clone git@github.com:burinc/b12n-cljsapp.git
cd b12n-cljsapp
npx josh public

This builds and opens nine finished browser games, Memory, Breakout, Tetris, Snake, 2048, Connect Four, Wordle, Galaga, Asteroids, plus a dashboard tying them together. Every one of them is Lisp (ClojureScript via Scittle) running directly in your browser tab, no compile step for the Clojure code itself, just plain .cljs files the browser interprets on load (npx josh above is only a tiny local dev server, needed to serve the files over http://, not to build anything). That's the whole course's promise in miniature: this is what Lisp-built games look like, and by the end of Phase 2 you'll have built several yourself.

What you're about to set up

This course's hands-on exercises run on JVM Clojure, calling raylib (a small, real C graphics library used by shipped commercial and indie games) directly through JDK's Panama foreign-function interface, no wrapper library, no codegen, the real C API. That's also why the setup below asks for JDK 22+ specifically: older JDKs can't do this.

Setup

  1. Install a JDK 22 or newer. Check with java -version. If you don't have one, Eclipse Temurin is a good default.
  2. Install the Clojure CLI. Check with clojure -version.
  3. Install Babashka (bb). Check with bb --version. Whole-repo checks (bb check, bb test) are bb tasks; running one specific exercise or example uses clojure -M:run -m <its-namespace> directly, every lesson from here on gives you the exact command to run, so you won't need to remember the pattern yourself.
  4. Clone this repo and confirm it's wired up:
       git clone git@github.com:burinc/b12n-gamedev-course.git
   cd b12n-gamedev-course
   bb tasks

You should see a list of available tasks, no errors.

macOS note

If a window you open from this course never appears, or the process hangs, you're very likely missing the -XstartOnFirstThread JVM flag - every windowed command this course teaches you to run already carries it via deps.edn's :run/:test aliases (clojure -M:run -m ..., bb test), so this should only bite you if you've built your own launcher that skips those aliases entirely. (clojure -M:check, used by bb check, does NOT carry the flag, but that's fine, since it only compiles, it never opens a window.) If you do hit this, add -J-XstartOnFirstThread to whatever command you're running yourself.

Next

Move on to Phase 1: Foundations.