A game DSL for kids

By the closing weeks of term 2 we had quite a nice console-based TicTacToe game built. The first of the kids were starting to complete functioning strategy classes and we could play two strategies against each other in an automated game. It was time to up the ante. The challenge now was to find a way to allow the kids to get more return for their efforts. If you asked them what they would like to build, games and something running on a mobile ranked high on their lists.

So this chapter is a response to that need. It's been coded part-time over a period of a few weeks. What I'll present here is a work in progress and it is presented warts and all. It is, however, a worthy illustration of a real life DSL integrated into lots of the technologies you might end up using yourselves. Let's look at what the goals were when writing this DSL and how they impacted the technology choices I made.