Did you program against a REPL connected to your game, with state maintaining hot reload? Does your editor support working with s-expressions (eg. slurping and barfing)?

Batch processing style programming (write to file, save, run, stop, repeat) in Lisp removes some 3/4 of what the language(s) offer. It's especially so if one is navigating code by text rather than structure, eg. jump-to-next-word instead of jump-to-next-expression.

What is magical about Lisps, esp. the ones that are fully featured in this sense (Common Lisp, Clojure), is that you're programming a running program without losing state when you re-evaluate code.

That is magic. Instead of doing the save-compile-run-setup-conditions-wait-for-result-repeat hundreds of times per session, you run and write the code for your given problem when it arises during gameplay.

On top of that you throw on things like paredit, condition systems and you're and order of magnitude less frustrated and dare I say it, productive, than when you constantly have to churn through constant transitions between the code-in-file and game-in-memory disparity.

For games especially, things like test driven development make no sense because state is so insanely tangled. So you either hope for the best, or you program against a live game. I prefer the second option.