Discussion
Took a bit of inspiration from the tildeverse / pubnix scene.
The next common lisp virtual pet that I write will primarily be about mutating state in a dotfile that contains your pet's vital signs.
$ ./update-pet
...will access a dotfile which will be copied, processed, and then written to an updated file.
That file will be able to be hosted publicly on a pubnix, allowing live access to the pet in the terminal.
my hope is that I will be able to lock the file so that multiple users can play.
So yes, there will be probably thousands of these little files all written to a specific save file folder.
The transparency of having a text file will allow users to customise their pet without having to interrogate or write any Lisp themselves.
You should, ideally, be able to customise your pet's faces, animation cycle, and even mess with the vital signs of your pet manually.
I am thinking of calling the virtual pet game 'athlete' or 'nougat'.
Probably for no other reason than I think the abstract for athlete would be 'the lil common lisp virtual pet that could', which I find charming.
Upon first start, the game will prompt with some deliberately cryptic randomly generated questions to help seed the pet the first time. Then, the pet's vital signs will be written to disk, and nothing happens until the user begins to interact with the pet in the command line.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
The idea will be to 'trade' or share the pet state files as a way of allowing pets to visit each other and have multiple people log into a containerised pubnix and look after a pet collectively.
I thought having the pet's functions revolve around state written to a text file would be a novel way to allow a nice mean between common lisp and the overall simplicity of 'everything is a file'.
The file will probably be very simple to inspect--an alist, otherwise known as an association list.