nowfound

Dev tools · August 17, 2019

CP

ClojureScript pixel game engine with Blender live-reloading

Hi HN! 2d spritesheets for game development are often distributed as a PNG image, sometimes with a separate JSON or XML metadata document describing the layout, including any animation sequences within the sheet. Sometimes there is no metadata document and you have to work it out and manually write custom code to chop up the spritesheet and reference the sprites you want. I think it would be good if it became standard practice to distribute spritesheet PNGs with the metadata inline inside a PNG "chunk" so the whole thing is self-contained. That way artists can just distribute one file, and…

ClojureScript pixel game engine with Blender live-reloading launched on August 17, 2019 with 285 votes, #47 of 3,185 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 7 years on.

Visit mccormick.cx ↗Alternativestop 1% of August 2019

In plain words

This ClojureScript-based game engine allows developers to create pixel games with integrated Blender support for live-reloading assets during development. Built for game developers working in Clojure, it streamlines the workflow between 3D modeling in Blender and game code, enabling real-time iteration without manual asset reimporting. The engine combines functional programming capabilities with practical game development tools.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Chris McCormick - News

Recently I've been hacking on a game engine for infinitelives called px3d . It's built on top of ClojureScript , Blender , and Three.js and it runs in the browser. One feature I'm particularly happy with is the live-reloading of Blender assets into the game. You hit "save" in Blender and the updates appear in the running game a second later - no need to re-compile or re-load the game. The way this works is with a background script which watches the assets.blend file. It re-builds the assets.glb whenever it is modified, and writes the hash of the file into assets.cljs . Figwheel pushes changes to the compiled cljs files whenever they change, and there is another bit of code which tells…from mccormick.cx

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hi HN! 2d spritesheets for game development are often distributed as a PNG image, sometimes with a separate JSON or XML metadata document describing the layout, including any animation sequences within the sheet. Sometimes there is no metadata document and you have to work it out and manually write custom code to…

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