Swarm 0.7 release, and Swarm at ZuriHac!

The Swarm development team is pleased to announce the latest alpha release of the game.

It’s been quite a while since our last release, and the pace of development has been slower this year—but development continues nonetheless!

Read on for a more in-depth discussion of some of the new features, or see the CHANGELOG or even the complete list of git commits.

What is it?

As a reminder, Swarm is a 2D, open-world programming and resource gathering game with a strongly-typed, functional programming language and a unique upgrade system.

ZuriHac!

Several of us will be at ZuriHac in person. If you’re at ZuriHac in person too, come say hi, try out the game, and maybe hack on some low-hanging fruit!

If you won’t be at ZuriHac in person but still want to try hacking on Swarm, come join our Discord server or The Swarm Hive on Gather.town!

New challenge scenarios

There are a number of new challenge scenarios included in this release, with example screenshots shown below.

Tutorial improvements

There have been a bunch of improvements to the in-game tutorial: from small things like making sure choosing Tutorial from the menu automatically takes you to the first unsolved tutorial level, to big things like level redesigns and prose rewrites.

Language improvements

The Swarm language itself hasn’t changed too much in this release. return has been renamed to pure (#2285), and we have retired fst and snd in favor of a pair elimination form called match (#2407). As usual, you can automatically convert 0.6 code to 0.7 with swarm format --v0.6.

There are also a few new commands:

• The print and erase commands allow printing values on paper (#2245).
• There is also a new read command, which can parse values from their textual representations (#2224).

Other enhancements

There were a ton of other small improvements, like fixing several space leaks, adding some achievements, adding a few hints to classic mode, adding a feature to render contiguous walls, and a number of small UI tweaks.

Give it a try!

To install, check out the installation instructions: you can download a binary release (Linux only, for now), or install from Hackage. Give it a try and send us your feedback, either via a GitHub issue or Discord!

Future plans & getting involved

We’re still hard at work on the game. Fun upcoming things include:

• More fully fleshed-out tournament server
• Saving and loading games
• New world features like aliens and cities
• New language features like arrays, inter-robot communication, and a proper import construct

Of course, there are also tons of small things that need fixing and polishing too! If you’re interested in getting involved, check out our contribution guide, come join us on Discord, or take a look at the list of issues marked “low-hanging fruit”.