Game Developer Created New Programming Language In 12 Hours
"I basically turned my dialogue editor into a compiler and accidentally had the most fun I've had in months."
They say you shouldn't reinvent the wheel, but real engineers wouldn't be real engineers if they didn't do it anyway. Game Developer & Technical Artist Alexandre Lacombe, also known as BuyMyBeard, unexpectedly found himself working on something he truly enjoyed and decided to share it with the world.
It all started when he began building a dialogue system for his retro-style action-adventure game in Unity. What began as a simple Dialogue Controller navigating a ScriptableObject node tree quickly grew out of control: hooks, loop support, conditional branches, option nodes, even a dedicated shop node. The feature list exploded far faster than he anticipated.
But even then, actually understanding the dialogue flow during debugging was clunky. So he built a preview window that walked through the tree and printed the entire structure in a clean, readable text format. Seeing everything laid out at once, nodes, loops, and conditions, finally made the system feel intuitive. And that's when it hit him: this looked a lot like a programming language. So he turned it into one called BMB_DSL.
"After about twelve hours of work, I now have:
- Fully working dialogue DSL;
- Parser;
- Integration with all my ScriptableObjects;
- Hooks, conditions, and localisation are fully supported;
- VSCode syntax highlighter because I couldn't stop myself."
Alexandre also published the syntax highlighting VSCode extension and made it open-source. You can find more details here and check out 80 Level's new digital art courses, subscribe to our Newsletter, and join our 80 Level Talent platform, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
