Game Development

This page and the #haskell-game IRC channel is the starting point 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

Articles and blog posts

• 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

Videos

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

• bloxors: an OpenGL Logic Game written in Haskell

Examples

• 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

• 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).