Game Development

This page and the #haskell-game IRC channel are the starting points for everyone interested in doing game development with Haskell. You may also wish to join the Games group on haskellers.com.

There are quite a lot of games, unfinished libraries, and interested people out there - please gather links here and join us on #haskell-game !

Games and game engines

• Applications and libraries/Games lists games and game engines/libs

• See also Hackage categories: Game, Game Engine, Graphics, Sound, Physics

Other supporting software

• grid provides tools for working with regular arrangements of tiles, such as might be used in a board game or self-organising map (SOM). Grid currently supports triangular, square, and hexagonal tiles, with various 2D and toroidal layouts (description).

Articles and blog posts

• The Quest for Programming Nirvana: On Programming Game Systems in Haskell; a Master Thesis on programming game systems in Haskell

• Functional Programming and 3D Games (thesis, PDF)

• Asteroids & Netwire

• Writing JavaScript games in Haskell - Breakout

• Purely Functional, Declarative Game Logic Using Reactive Programming

• Computer Games' - trying to implement the game flow of a computer game

• The Next Mainstream Programming Languages: A Game Developer's Perspective (PPT, PDF) presentation by Tim Sweeney

• Purely Functional Retrogames

• Accidentally Introducing Side Effects into Purely Functional Code

• wxHaskell - A Portable and Concise GUI Library for Haskell (PDF) - describes an implementation of an asteroids game, wxAsteroids

• Haskell for Games! Blog post, with PDF slides from AngloHaskell talk.

• Postmortem: Naughty Dog's Jak and Daxter: the Precursor Legacy; an article about a game developed with a DSL compiler written in Lisp

• Lambdor blog mostly about Yampa FRP and game development in Haskell with some tutorials

• Writing JavaScript games in Haskell

• LambdaCube 3D is a domain specific language and library that makes it possible to program GPUs in a purely functional style.

Videos

• Games in Haskell - Matthew Sackman and Tristan Allwood on developing games with OpenGL in Haskell

• bloxors: an OpenGL Logic Game written in Haskell

• LambdaCube 3D - Stunts example

• LambdaCube 3D - Quake 3 example

Examples

• GorillaBAS - this was an attempt on defining computer games, and build such a thing.

• https://github.com/mlesniak/game - Haskell/OpenGL/Chipmunk game prototypes

• wxAsteroids, a well-documented game, based on wxHaskell

• hssdl-mac-example - how to make an SDL-using package buildable on mac OSX

• http://codepad.org/LRGEkkDp - initialization for SDL to start rendering OpenGL stuff

• http://hackage.haskell.org/package/stunts - A revival of the classic racing game Stunts to serve as a non-toy-sized example for LambdaCube.

• http://hackage.haskell.org/package/dow - Dungeons of Wor is an homage to the classic arcade game, Wizard of Wor. This game is also an experiment in functional reactive programming, so it might be a useful resource to anyone interested in this topic.

• Possible Hackage categorisation guidelines: upload games to Game, engines and libs to Game Engine, or at least to some category beginning with Game, and check latest categories before uploading

Wishlist

Is hackage missing a useful data structure or library for some functionality that would benefit game programming? Suggestions for useful things can be added here as potential projects to hack on.

• Octtree, kd-tree, various space partitioning techniques (maybe start with spacepart).

• Binding to fmod

• Binding to enet for multiplayer games. (jeffz is working on this).