When I was 14, I felt a desperate urge to program computer games. I collected $25 to buy a book that would teach me programming. It was a huge brick titled “Teach yourself Visual Basic 6.0 in 21 days”, and I soon figured out that I'd need $1000 more to obtain the tools that would allow me to use the knowledge contained in the book. That I could not afford.
Times have changed a lot since then. Windows 95 is no longer a dictator on desktop computers, there are many excellent free tools and libraries for developers (often much better than the proprietary ones), and knowledge on the Web is available to virtually everyone.
However, many tools are much more difficult to learn than they could be, or aren't available on as many systems as one could wish. Furthermore, existing soultions frequently impose many restrictions on the way the things can be done.
SLAYER was conceived to address those issues. It is meant to be an accessible, portable and extensible multimedia environment that would be suitable for learning as well as game development and unconventional or highly customizable GUI/multimedia applications. It uses SDL for portability and is built on top of Guile Scheme for accessibility and extensibility.
In a way SLAYER can resemble fluxus1. There are however some essential differences between those systems. Fluxus is intended to work mainly with 3D-graphics, while SLAYER works with 2D objects just as fine. Fluxus has a built-in editor, while SLAYER is kept minimalistic and only allows to add an editor widget to the stage, which perhaps makes it more flexible. (By the way, such widget is already provided and used in one of the demos.) Also, fluxus is focused on live coding and sound processing, but there are no good sound processing libraries for SLAYER yet.
Lastly, SLAYER works with Guile Scheme, and fluxus uses Racket. These are both Scheme-based languages, but their extensions are incompatible with each other. They're both cool, though.