blurbs

David O'Toole is a Lisp developer living in Central Massachusetts, USA, who works in Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp. His lifelong interest in video and computer games led him to study computer science and then to work at Irrational Games in Boston (now called 2K Boston). David is now a consultant and builds custom audio-oriented computers in his spare time.

His website is at http://dto.github.com/notebook/

"Common Lisp and Rogue-like Games"

The 1980 gaming classic "Rogue" and its descendants (NetHack and Angband, among many others) continue to thrill hard-core gamers, finding a new audience many years later. Part of the thrill comes from the high replayability factor brought about by the genres's randomized settings/ and endlessly variable play experiences; rogue-like games used "procedural content generation" a long time before it became a games-industry buzzword. These games have usually been written in C or C++, but a growing, seething mass of Lisp Rogue-likes have lurched ominously onto the scene. I'll show how Rogue-like games present interesting challenges to the Lisp developer, and how I met those challenges with video demonstrations of my code in action.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike