The mechanics of BioMechanics

Last month, I worked for about a month on BioMechanics, which is a puzzle game that we created for the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Game Maker Awards competition.

The game is created using Raylib, a simple C library for creating video games, and written in Zig, a relatively new systems programming language (we used the raylib-zig raylib bindings).

The gameplay itself revolves around the idea of shifting rows, columns, and diagonals to repair machines to a desired state. People have told me that it reminds them of the Rubik’s cube puzzle.

I plan to add more technical details regarding specific functions of the game, and I will update this blog post when I get the time to do so.

The night before we had to submit, I realized our game kept throwing out of memory exceptions when running on WebAssembly. So in case it helps anyone, here are some really important flags to pass to the emscripten compiler if your program makes enough memory allocations to exceed the default heap size.

link_step.addArg("-s");
link_step.addArg("ALLOW_MEMORY_GROWTH");

link_step.addArg("-s");
link_step.addArg("TOTAL_STACK=256mb");

On command line I believe it would look something like this:

$ emcc ... -s ALLOW_MEMORY_GROWTH -s TOTAL_STACK=256mb

Try the game here! It runs on WebAssembly. Please note that a keyboard is required to play the game as I am still working on the mouse control scheme.