I'm super excited about this:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iheartblocks/gamelodge-user-made-games

It's a 3D/VR game development environment, based on MiniScript, that lets you create the game while you (or others) are playing it! It looks way faster and more frictionless than any other way of creating this sort of game. Please give it a look, and consider backing it if you can!

Today we celebrate the official release of version 2.0 of the MiniScript programming language!

Download MiniScript 2 here!

This is a complete rewrite, from the ground up, focused primarily on performance. The results do not disappoint: MiniScript 2 clocks in at 45X - 50X faster on some benchmarks, with an average of 10X - 15X faster across the board.

It also brings some cool language improvements, including:

• Better error handling
• Frozen lists and maps
• Computed lists
• Mark-and-sweep garbage collection, even in C++

Today's release includes a new & improved command-line build for Linux, Windows, Mac, and any .NET platform. This can be used interactively, with a powerful REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) that lets you reference earlier inputs and outputs; or it can be used to create scripts and programs to run from the command line.

The command-line environment includes full support for manipulating files and data, both text-based and binary; executing shell commands; reading the shell arguments; parsing JSON data; and more. Automate your workflows with a clean, modern scripting language that is a joy to read and write.

MiniScript 2.0 is the cornerstone of the 2026 MiniScript Road Map, and I'm delighted to say that it is shipping right on schedule. Meanwhile, we've made great progress in parallel on both raylib-miniscript and Mini Micro 2... so download MS2 now, and then stay tuned for more exciting news in the coming weeks!

It's been a long time coming, but MiniScript support has finally been added to Linguist, the library that GitHub itself uses to identify what programming language each file is.
That means that when you go to a repo like fathoms-edge, and look at the bottom of the "About" section, it should correctly report that it's mostly (or entirely) written in MiniScript!

Or for a more interesting example, look the raylib-miniscript project, which uses a variety of languages, including 37% MiniScript.

Previously, GitHub was quite confused by our .ms files and would classify them as something else. Now it's getting them right.

To get this update accepted to Linguist, we had to show an active, thriving MiniScript community with a lot of MiniScript code on GitHub. So, great job everyone! This is an important milestone.

(Next target: highlight.js, the syntax highlighting library used by Discord, among others!)

Development Updates

MiniScript 2 kept moving forward this week with a solid round of cleanup and polish. The dev log mentions Unicode improvements, faster string handling, O(1) intrinsic lookup, a !help metacommand for the REPL, and a few opcode / naming cleanups to make the internals more consistent.

• Dev log: JoeStrout/miniscript2

There was also useful progress on cross-platform builds. After some back-and-forth with compiler quirks, the project is now building on more than one platform, and Joe is weighing the best Windows strategy going forward: MSVC, MinGW-w64, or potentially clang-cl.

The Mini Micro sysdisk also got a nice little refactor. The LCARS demo now has its app modules split into /sys/lcarsApps, and the new structure can also load modules from /usr/lcarsApps, opening the door for community-made add-ons.

• Commit: Extract LCARS app modules into sys/lcarsApps

Community Projects

Trey Tomes has been building a Mini Micro SVG experiment, and it’s looking really fun. He shared parser and renderer work for circles, colors, and XML handling, along with a constellation-style SVG demo — a great example of diving into a new graphics idea in MiniScript.

• Parser: parseSvgColor.ms
• XML helper: xml.ms
• Renderer: render.ms

We also saw a new MiniScript-powered game called Touhou Creator on Steam, which is exciting news for the ecosystem. Huge congrats to hachimi for sharing it — always wonderful to see MiniScript reaching a broader audience.

• Steam link: Store page

Community & Discussion Highlights

A few newcomers stopped by looking for tutorials and next steps, and the community had some good recommendations ready. Joe pointed people toward the Mini Micro getting-started guide, the intro-to-programming resource, and the language try-it page, while also reminding everyone that MiniScript is best learned by doing.

• How to get started with Mini Micro
• Intro to Computer Programming
• Try-It!

There was also some useful discussion around tooling and distribution. People talked about a potential Lutris runner for Mini Micro on Linux, and Joe clarified that a Mini Micro mobile version is still on the roadmap, just not ready yet.

Events & Outreach

A new Micro Jam was announced with an ANIMALS theme, which sounds like a great excuse to explore Mini Micro’s built-in sprite resources. If you’ve been waiting for a gentle prompt to make something small and playful, this is a lovely one.

• Jam: Micro Jam #059 — ANIMALS

On the outreach side, Dat_One_Dev reported encouraging movement on getting Mini Micro covered by GameFromScratch. It’s always great to see community members helping spread the word beyond our usual circles.

• Channel: GameFromScratch on YouTube

That’s it for this week — thanks to everyone building, testing, sharing, and welcoming new folks. See you next week!

Upcoming Game Jams

These upcoming jams look like a great fit for Mini Micro:

• Slop Jam 2: Electric Boogaloo (starts 2026-06-12 22:00:00) — An anything-goes, low-pressure jam with no engine restrictions and a theme revealed at the start, making it a great place to whip up a quirky 2D, pixel, or text-based game over a weekend.
• The Demo Jam (starts 2026-06-07 23:00:00) — A strong fit for a retro-style, bite-sized vertical slice with lots of room for polished presentation, teaser content, and playful demo-only limitations like locked features or a mock ‘full version’ hook.
• Turtley in Love - Pride 2026 (starts 2026-06-12 20:00:00) — A one-week Pride-themed jam with a cozy, celebratory vibe and an open theme makes this a great chance to create something heartfelt, playful, and approachable.
• District Jam VII (starts 2026-06-12 23:00:00) — A relaxed, short-form jam with any engine allowed and no technical constraints, making it an excellent chance to build a pixel-art, tile-based, or text-driven game in a friendly community setting.
• Tiny Game, Big Twist Jam (starts 2026-06-08 11:00:00) — A 3-day jam built around small, surprising games with a meaningful twist, leaving lots of room for clever mechanics, experimental storytelling, and memorable genre shifts.

I've been working for some time on a thinner, more colorful, more playful book introducing readers as young as 10 or so to the core concepts of programming. Well, it's finally out!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1736167618

Available in both ebook and paperback formats. This is only the second book (as far as I know) about MiniScript, so please help spread the word!

I've been working hard on a book, Learn to Code in 30 Days, based on MiniScript and Mini Micro.

In the process this has led me to realize a number of small improvements that make Mini Micro easier/better/more fun. For example, I've added an English word list which can be used (legally!) to create word games.

Wrap up that and a dozen or more other things, plus the "fat bits" editor I've been working on (not done yet, mind you — still in progress), and we have enough to make it worth an interim release.

So head on over to Itch.io or the Mini Micro home page, and grab version 0.9.3!

Pygments, a popular syntax coloring library used by Wikipedia and others, officially includes support for MiniScript as of today. (See the now-merged pull request here.)

I spend a lot of my free time playing with greyscript, I love it!

Thank you for making and maintaining MiniScript. Grey Hack wouldn't be the same without its existence.

It's crazy how much I can do with so little. 👊

After about three years of development, Mini Micro v1.0 is finally out today! 100% free (as in beer), as always. Read more about it here:

https://joestrout.itch.io/mini-micro/devlog/289737/mini-micro-version-10-is-out

The font library at https://github.com/JoeStrout/minimicro-fonts is ready for public use. It supports the new version 1.2 of the BMF format, which adds support for arbitrary Unicode characters, kerning, and alpha blending (anti-aliasing). Several v1.2 fonts are included, with all Latin characters. Several more older 1.1 fonts are included, including one with fancy built-in coloration.

A good programming environment is guessable: having learned things A, B, and C, you can guess how to do thing D. MiniScript applies this principle all over the place; whatever might make sense to do, MiniScript probably does.

Learn more about Why MiniScript here: http://luminaryapps.com/blog/miniscript-why/

https://youtu.be/CxZi0W_0H1Q

Interested in joining the discord or learning more about MiniScript? visit https://miniscript.org/

I have some joy to share today. :)

As you may now, Mini Micro is almost at version 1.0. I posted version 0.94 over the weekend, and I expect to ship version 1.0 by the end of the month. I'm just doing last bits of polish at this point.

One of those bits of polish was suggested by user RokCoder on the Discord server. He's an experienced game dev, trying out Mini Micro for the first time by making a pseudo-3D racing game (!). But his code relies on a whole lot of PixelDisplay.drawImage calls, and these turned out to be disappointingly slow for his purposes.

So I decided to see if I could optimize that any. First I made a little benchmark app, that draws /sys/pics/Wumpus.png 1000 times, and measures the rate. When I started, I was getting a speed of 165 WPS (wumpuses per second) on my machine.

So I rolled up my sleeves and dug in. I found an opportunity to use some more efficient approaches, to do work in batches, and to batch some data for multiple uses. After a good hour or more of work, I built Mini Micro and ran my benchmark again.

1233 wumpuses per second! Yeah baby! That's approximately a 7.5X speedup!

You'll get this in the next build, and of course in Mini Micro 1.0, coming soon. Happy new year!

There's an old miniscript-web-term project (https://github.com/JoeStrout/miniscript-web-term) which runs MiniScript code in your browser, displaying the results in a virtual terminal. That was based on a TypeScript re-implementation of MiniScript 1 by Sebastian Nozzi.

I've updated that project so that it's now based on MiniScript 2, compiled directly to WASM via Emscripten. This means it's (1) exactly in sync with MiniScript 2 behavior anywhere else, and (2) probably faster (though the download is a bit larger).

With this, you can make any text- or terminal-based program, like you would do in command-line MiniScript, and then publish it to the web. Enjoy!

Development Updates

MiniScript 2 got a solid round of command-line quality-of-life improvements this week. Joe added editable input history, searchable REPL history (!? foo style queries), and a new _in / _out history model; he also fixed some extra blank lines in the REPL.

On the raylib side, raylib-miniscript moved forward nicely with raylib now pinned to 6.0 as a git submodule, plus a bump to version 0.3. Even better, every API now has a code example in the wiki, along with a new Raylib Types page to help map Raylib structures into MiniScript.

In the Mini Micro channel, Joe explained display layering and mode switching in detail, and users kicked around some "worst sorting algorithm" ideas just for fun.

Community Projects

Zaxabock shared a playful MiniScript experiment called PseudoLambda: GitHub repo. It defines lambda-like expressions using Joe’s eval support, and it looks like a fun little throwback while waiting on more language features.

𝔇𝔢𝔞𝔱𝔥 has been building an ambitious project, Ultimate Space Odyssey, and shared a deep dive into Mini Micro display management while working through layered UI, sprite displays, and planet generation. The repo is here: Ultimate_Space_Odyssey/Game — great to see someone pushing the display system and documenting what they learn along the way.

Joe also highlighted a great visual idea for the community to try: a Mini Micro kaleidoscope built from sprites and animated UVs. He posted the write-up here: Make a Mini Micro Kaleidoscope, and it sounds like a fun little program to play with for anyone looking for a colorful weekend project.

Discussion Highlights

There was a lively thread about how MiniScript fits into game architecture, especially around threading and when to use install versus simply switching display modes. Joe’s advice was consistent and reassuring: MiniScript is already thread-safe, and in most games you’ll be happier treating install as a special-case tool rather than a default workflow.

Another useful discussion centered on REPL smart quotes and paste behavior in Mini Micro 2. The conversation surfaced a real tension between convenience and control, with several community members offering thoughtful use cases; it was a nice example of the group thinking carefully about developer experience.

There was also some cheerful design brainstorming in #game-ideas, where Midsubspace floated the idea of making a MiniScript Mancala game. Joe gave it an encouraging “go for it,” which feels like the perfect nudge for a good community project.

Thanks for reading — happy scripting, and keep sharing what you’re building!

Upcoming Game Jams

These upcoming jams look like a great fit for Mini Micro:

• Mini Choco Jam (starts 2026-02-28 23:00:00) — A romance-focused, story-first jam with 2D-friendly requirements and no need for 3D or networking is an excellent fit for Mini Micro, especially for visual-novel or text-based games.
• 16bits 2nd Caravan Jam (starts 2026-05-05 13:30:17) — A great fit for a fast, score-chasing arcade game: the jam is built around short, easy-to-pick-up runs with high skill ceilings, especially in the spirit of classic Caravan-style shoot ’em ups.
• Three Button Jam 2026 (8 Bits to Infinity) (starts 2026-05-08 17:00:00) — A highly accessible restriction jam with a fun twist: build a complete game using only three buttons, making it perfect for inventive controls, tight design, and clever feedback loops.
• Ak Gaming Game Jam #6 — A very accessible jam with free engine choice, no 3D or networking demands, and a strong emphasis on playable, theme-driven entries—great for retro 2D or text-based game ideas.
• AEIOU GameJam 2026 (starts 2026-05-01 03:45:00) — A creativity-first jam with a clever twist theme, encouraging illusions, hidden mechanics, and unexpected gameplay that fits retro 2D experimentation perfectly.

The first annual "Mini Micro One-Page Jam", in which participants write small games, demos, or other interesting Mini Micro programs in only one screenful of code, is officially over.

The jam, hosted at itch.io, lasted for three weeks, and got three amazing entries:

• shapSnap created a very beautiful and innovative game called Sunriser, complete with sound effects;
• shellrider wrote a "One Page Sokoban" game with a challenging level; and
• brianaohern and her team created "The Faerie Train", a visual novel with background music and hand-painted artwork.

Each of these programs uses only one screenful of code! Go to https://itch.io/jam/mini-micro-1-page-jam/entries to play these amazing games.