After a year of on-and-off work, one of my long-term dreams has come true; that is, to create—and actually finish—a project together with Zuzka, my beloved partner in crime. What we created is in terms of mechanics a tiny game, a sort of remix of four-in-a-row, but with cute squirrels, flashy animations, a nice tutorial, and the grid is hexagonal instead of square. As expected, I was responsible for the coding, while Zuzka designed all of the UX/UI, as well as all of the super cute hand-drawn art.
Our game is called Fruits & Tails and you can play it right now on your PC, phone, tablet, or whatever device with a modern-enough web browser you have on hand, at FruitsAndTails.fghj.cz.
Fruits & Tails is completely hand-made. It was written in Zig, with its only external dependencies being the standard library, Web APIs (mostly CanvasRenderingContext2D and input events), and UglifyJS – the last one being optional to make release builds as small as possible. We’re not even using any ready-made glue code of the WASI or Emscripten kind – the glue to interact with the Web APIs is just a 600-line index.js file, hand-rolled on an as-needed basis. All this makes for a neat package of 5.1 MiB (compiled in ReleaseSmall mode, with JavaScript minification), of which 4.8 MiB are the art assets.
Currently, you can play this with a friend, offline, on a single device. The plan, though, is to also add a way to play online, and I’ve already been cooking up an algorithmic opponent (you know, AI, but the good kind) that is already quite competent at playing the game, so that’s coming in an update soon-ish.
If you want to know more about our little journey, stay tuned! I’m going to touch on the brief history of the game, as well as some of the inner workings of its engine. I’m also planning to release the source code, so if you are looking into Zig—specifically in conjunction with WebAssembly—it might just turn out to be a helpful resource.
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