Gregory and his dog, Linux, at the beach
Gregory Croisdale
He / Him / His Founding Engineer @ Khaki Prev HCI and PL @ UMich

LangJam GameJam 2025: Day -1

This year, I am joining Austin Henley’s Langjam Gamejam, and creating a programming language, and a game using that programming language, within one week (Dec 14th - Dec 20th).

If you have a familiarity with the development of games, engines, or programming languages, this might seem like a ridiculous task (as some have expressed) — but I maintain optimism: I interpret the rules of this jam rather loosely, and also have come to respect the Domain-Specific Language as a (potentially) simple and powerful tool; creating notation to create a particular game is orders of magnitudes easier than writing a language for general purpose programming.

Interpreting the Rules

One of my favorite games ever, Baba is You, was created for the 3-day 2017 Nordic Game Jam. At first glance, one might dispute that Baba is You fulfils our criteria, but any experienced Kiki will certainly have experience with the meta language Baba is You is built around; the gameplay is entirely based on the ability to manipulate programs, and even some of the languages’s semantics.

Does Baba is You “create a language” and “use it”? In my mind, there is no doubt.

My strategy

Like Baba is You, I hope to create a language whose tools actually comprise the game — I want my IDE to be fun enough that you want to play with it.

Whereas Baba is You is largely “turn-based”, I want something more real-time, where speed and agility of manipulation are key.

The Spreadsheet Genre

People will often refer to games that involve massive amounts of complicated data, like Europa Universalis, or Football Manager, as “spreadsheet games”, but as a true spreadsheet enjoyer, I get a little offended.

To me, a lot of the fun of a spreadsheet is actually interacting with data in the grid format — copy, pasting, dragging, and in a live environment like Google Sheets, fighting for the value of a cell.

There are even Excel World Championships! With little-to-no overlap with Europa Universalis players…

I’m also inspired by several hours playing in cellular automata and tile-based physics games, like Game of Life and Powder Game. I think there’s potential for some really interesting interactions between these experiences.

Execution

I would really like to have an interactive spreadsheet experience done within the first 24 hours of the GameJam.

I want to use a Rust-based stack, with my primary target being WebAssembly. I will likely use WGPU, but with the OpenGL Backend because Firefox is too busy implementing integrated Chatbots to add a stable or efficient WebGPU.

I want a clean, and opinionated data model — I’ll probably use a dense representation of the grid with an absolute limit; I’ll excuse myself for this purity sin, as I don’t expect any major world governments relying on this for disease tracking…

Where the “fun” will come from

I love games that introduce simple mechanics, and scale them in unexpected ways. For example, the ability to manipulate the rules of Baba is You’s language inside of the language itself is a moment that added an entirely new dimension of creativity and fun to the game.

Some avenues I’d love to explore here:

  1. Numbers -> AI Embedding (Text, Images, Motion?)
  2. Get creative with rendering — 3d?
  3. Add physics — gravity? collisions?
  4. Have fun with portals!
  5. Shortcuts + automation
  6. Cell permissions, formatting
  7. Controlling AI in a fun and live way (like my project, DeckFlow, or my friend Shm’s project, DreamSheets)
  8. What are some unique ways I could embed a narrative?

The Game

I hope to update this blog post daily throughout my journey, with live links to playable prototypes.

If you are interested in joining this GameJam, do it here: https://langjamgamejam.com! Make sure to join the Discord!

…also, I am legally obligated to inform you that you have lost the game. Sorry.

Update! I didn’t immediately abandon this project. See my Day 0 post.