🐉
This game is from ldjam.com, which is currently unavailable.
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An odd little adventure made entirely of emoji. I don't just mean the UI; the game engine itself is made out of emoji.
The game is built around a simple rewriting system for emoji, each operation replacing some collection of emoji with others, with the player and the game together making choices of which legal operations to perform based on the symbols available. As such systems are Turing-complete, I was able to implement a game engine out of these rewrite rules, featuring exploration, turn-based combat, and leveling up. I made things easier for myself by creating shorthand codes for commonly useful operations (for example, "🥚🔁🐣" means "replace 🥚 with 🐣 as many times as possible"). I also made something like an event system whereby rules can be grouped with a tag: "▶🔜" means "perform all currently-legal operations tagged with 🔜". As an example, the "damage" emoji is 💔, and it's associated with the rule "🆕:💔❤➡🖤", meaning "immediately after creating a 💔, perform the substitution 'replace 💔❤ with 🖤' once."
The game is built around a simple rewriting system for emoji, each operation replacing some collection of emoji with others, with the player and the game together making choices of which legal operations to perform based on the symbols available. As such systems are Turing-complete, I was able to implement a game engine out of these rewrite rules, featuring exploration, turn-based combat, and leveling up. I made things easier for myself by creating shorthand codes for commonly useful operations (for example, "🥚🔁🐣" means "replace 🥚 with 🐣 as many times as possible"). I also made something like an event system whereby rules can be grouped with a tag: "▶🔜" means "perform all currently-legal operations tagged with 🔜". As an example, the "damage" emoji is 💔, and it's associated with the rule "🆕:💔❤➡🖤", meaning "immediately after creating a 💔, perform the substitution 'replace 💔❤ with 🖤' once."