rostrum.blog - R is a game engine, fight me (2024)

tl;dr

R is ‘a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics’. Ahahaha, no it’s not, it’s a game engine. I’ve created a ‘splendid’ list of games you can play—written in R—to prove it. Help expand it.

Stats only!

R is not a general, multi-purpose programming language. It was written to do statistical analysis and make charts. You are literally not allowed to do anything else with it. You should use <LANGUAGE> instead, which is much more suited to your specific use case. R is a joke language for nerds.

You should not read beyond this point if you think, quite rightly, that mirth and frivolity are unsuited to an R session.

Stats only?

Unity. Unreal. GameMaker. Godot. All of these videogame engines are now obsolete.

It is R—humble R!—that represents the future of gaming.

To prove it, I’ve created a list of ‘splendid R games’ in a GitHub repo1 that you are welcome to contribute to.2

Yes, R can be used for fun. Do not tell R Core.

Wait, he’s serious?

I think there’s three kinds of ‘platform’ for games written in R:

1. For the console
2. In Shiny
3. Ported

Games played in the console are pretty straightforward and probably most common. You can run some code, or a function from a package, to launch some code in the R console that you can interact with. A simple option for this might involve use of readline() to receive user input, for example, like Giora Simchoni’s excellent text-based puzzler, Castle of R.

Shiny can give you a little more flexibility when it comes to graphics and user input, at the expense of needing to host the app and maybe some extra JavaScript skills. A great example of this is Pedro Silva’s winning entry (app, source) to the Posit Shiny contest in 2020.

The third category is a little more boundary-pushing. Imagine if R was powerful enough to let you port existing games. Well, surprise, ya boi Mike Cheng (aka coolbutuseless) has pushed hard on expanding the capabilities of R to run fast enough and with realtime user input,3 porting the classic Another World (1991) to R, which was showcased at 2022’s Posit conference (source, video, blog).

Of course, within these ‘platforms’ are genres like word games, arcade games, puzzle games, etc. Will you be the first to create an MMORPG (a massively-multiplayer online R-powered game)?

I am an indie game dev now

I’ve always been interested in how videogames are coded,4 wishing that I could do the same myself. Of course I could simply learn ‘real’ programming languages.

Except that’s blasphemy. Of course I’d rather break my own mind and spirit in an attempt to make R achieve 0.1% of what might be possible in P*thon.

Case in point, I’ve made a few R packages containing some little toys (in order of gooddest to baddest):

• {r.oguelike} (source, blogs) for a procedural-dungeon explorer with enemy pathfinding and inventory
• {tamRgo} (source, blog) for a cyber pet in your R console that persists between sessions
• {safar6} (source, blog) for a text-based re-make of the Safari Zone from the first generation of Pokémon games
• {ActionSquirrel} (source, blog) for a tile-based, turn-based minigame in the R console
• {hokey} (source, blog) for minigames that use direct keypress inputs with {keypress}

I’ve got something in the pipeline that involves extremely rudimentary physics in the R console. Wow! For release in 2023 (because game launches never go wrong).

Ready Player 2

The splendid list must be missing a bunch of games. Please leave an issue or pull request in the splendid-r-games repo to add more examples.

Next stop: letting people run R games in the browser without an installed copy of R. This is already possible with a service like Binder, which can spin up an instance of RStudio with packages pre-installed I did this for {r.oguelike}).

But soon you might be able to use WebR to play games in the browser without even spinning up RStudio, ooh. So look out for an R version of itch.io in future, lol.