Aqua IV

Your map’s rules are written in Go

Go is a small language made at Google. It has twenty-five keywords and usually one way to do a thing, and its compiler tells you plainly what is wrong. Twitch, Uber and Riot Games use it. If you have written TypeScript, Lua or Python, you will be able to read a W4 script on day one. Open the scripts folder in Zed or VS Code and your editor suggests W4 functions as you type and flags mistakes before you press Play. The game runs the script in a sandbox with no access to your disk or the network, and it plays the same on every computer. Go also looks after memory for you, so there is no manual cleanup and none of the leaks that JASS handles are known for. The example here is a whole map: a quest, and a grunt that walks in every twenty seconds with a wave counter. The timer function remembers the counter on its own, which is a closure, and JASS has nothing like it. GUI triggers are planned for later, on top of Go.

package main

import (
	"w4/event"
	"w4/game"
	"w4/player"
	"w4/ui"
)

func main() {
	wave := 0

	event.OnMapInit(func() {
		ui.Quest(player.Everyone, "hold", "Hold the line", "Keep the grunts out")
	})

	// Every twenty seconds a grunt walks in. The function remembers wave, even
	// though it runs later: Go calls that a closure, and JASS has nothing like it.
	event.Every(20, func() {
		wave++
		game.Printf("Wave %d", wave)
		grunt := game.SpawnUnit("Grunt", 40, 40, player.NeutralAggressive)
		grunt.Move(12, 12)
	})
}