Draft

Making Fun Games with Clojure + Raylib

A talk about porting classic games to Clojure using Raylib via FFI
Author

Burin Choomnuan

Published

February 6, 2026

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                   :description "A talk about porting classic games to Clojure using Raylib via FFI"
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                   :date "2026-02-06"
                   :category :collaboration
                   :tags [:clojure :gamedev :raylib :ffi :creative-coding :games]}}}
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Making Fun Games with Clojure + Raylib

Format: Talk (30-45 min)

Summary: Can you build real, playable games in Clojure? Yes you can — and it’s more fun than you’d expect!

In this talk, I’ll share my experience porting classic games (Snake, Floppy Bird, a retro 3D maze, and more) from C to Clojure using Raylib — a simple and elegant C game library — called directly from Clojure via JDK 22’s Foreign Function API (Project Panama).

This work builds on the excellent raylib-clojure-playground by Ertuğrul Çetin, which showed how to use coffi to bridge Clojure and Raylib’s C API.

I extended the project with a large collection of ported examples — spanning games, 3D demos, audio, and more — to show that Clojure is a surprisingly great language for game development.

What I’ll Cover

1. Why Clojure for Games?

  • Immutable game state in an atom — the game loop is just swap! + pure functions

  • REPL-driven development: tweak a running game live!

  • Clojure’s data-oriented design maps naturally to game entities

2. The Architecture

  • How Raylib’s C API is called from Clojure via coffi + JDK Panama
  • The game loop pattern: init → tick → draw → cleanup
  • Game state as a single Clojure map in an atom

3. Live Demo: Porting a Game

  • Walk through porting a classic game from C → Clojure
  • Show the side-by-side: C code vs idiomatic Clojure
  • Highlight what becomes simpler (and what’s tricky)

4. The Fun Part: REPL-Driven Game Dev

  • Connect to a running game via nREPL
  • Modify game state live: spawn enemies, change physics, resize things
  • This is the superpower that makes Clojure game dev uniquely fun

Who Is This Talk For?

  • Clojure developers curious about creative coding and games
  • Game developers curious about functional programming
  • Anyone who thinks “Clojure + games” sounds like fun

No prior game development experience required!

Key Takeaway

Clojure’s REPL, immutable data, and functional style make it a surprisingly joyful language for building games. You don’t need Unity or Unreal — sometimes all you need is a REPL, an atom, and a few hundred lines of Clojure.