mrpedrobraga / sol

Toolchain for the Sol programming language.

Sol

A programming language for custom content.

Warning

Sol is in early development and should not be used for real projects yet. Feel free to become part of the conversation, though, and help me determine its future :-)

Sol brings modern programming language design to reinvent how you create and maintain game assets. Its syntax is beautiful AND productive AND type-safe. It takes inspiration from LUA, Rust and GDScript to create an amazing development experience aesthetically and organizationally.

Sol is also free, open-source, engine-agnostic and not owned by a company. After you author an asset, you really own it and can easily port it to other engines.

Each .sol file is an "asset" which can be, for example, an item...

-- weapons/iron_sword.sol

using game.models.*
using game.sprites.icons

impl ItemKind
  label = "Iron Sword"
  durability = 4
  icon = icons.iron_sword

  action on_use(target: Character)
    target.try_equip_weapon(weapon: self)
  end
end

...or a scene...

using game.chars.Jude

--todo Add portraits to those dialogues;
def "Main Scene"
  [Echo]
  - Jude, could you please move a little?

  [Jude]
  - nah

  [Echo]
  - I'll hit you in the head with a pan.

  [Jude]
  - *moves*

  move(who: Jude, by: vec2(1, 0))
end

...or even a level.

...impl Room

def player_spawn : Marker
  position = vec2(-10, -3)
  facing = DOWN
end

def chest1 : Chest
  position = vec2(0, 0)
end

Anything that is your games' "content" and not the core mechanic you have to code against the engine, you can put in .sol files :-)

The scripting capability of sol looks simple (courtesy of the LUA-esque syntax) but is far from minimal. Sol is a programming language, and it is fast as its VM is built with Rust.

Features

• Just text: Can be checked into version control easily;
• Engine agnostic: Your assets will not be 'Godot' assets or 'Unity' assets, but your assets, wherever you take them;
• Incredibly fast iteration cycles;
• Easy but powerful dialogues, in a syntax so simple, you'll probably use it for sketching the roughs even;

[Jude smiling]
- Hello, there!
- I found one item here and I want to give it to you, {player.name}!

• Thorough type safety, following the slogan "Make Invalid States Unrepresentable" to eliminate entire classes of bugs common in game dev;

model Item
  field name : text
  field unbreakable : truth
  field icon : Image
  if not unbreakable then
    field durability : nat
  end
end

• Dependency management with sol add <dependency_uri>, to quickly install asset packs or frameworks into your project;
• Interoperability with external resources (.png, .gltf, .aseprite) through the usage of extensions;
• Possibility of integration with engines;
• Refactoring tools like the LSP and sol migrate;

Installing

You can compile from source as a rust project, or install from crates.io via cargo.

cargo install sol-lang

Futurely, I want to provide integration plugins for a few engines. In those cases, the plugin will take care of building sol.

Sol LSP is being worked on, as well as a Zed extension.

Contributing

Not yet available.

---

^[1] - "Make Invalid States Unrepresentable."