I wrote here about gamedev in Haskell, but I didn’t have much to show. I was still exploring some ideas and I wasn’t sure it was going anywhere.
Now I think the engine is taking shape and there’s a public git repo, but I forgot to mention it here. For some reason, when I talk about these things in a channel, I forgot to do the same in the others.
Currently we have:
- My Mastodon account, where I tend to update often if I don’t stream, but I always forget to announce when I’m streaming.
- My Twitch channel, where I stream when I’m in the right mood –and I’m not too tired–. Sometimes I just want to code, and making it publicly requires considerably more energy.
- My coding sessions on my YouTube channel, where I upload a copy of some of the Twitch stream –Twitch removes the past stream videos after a while–. I don’t like Twitch too much, but I don’t like YT either; I seem to get more views and comments on YT though.
And, of course, there is this blog. So I guess a good way of following this project could be following me in one of those, and probably not this blog, because I’m not consistent enough!
The engine is nothing too special, other than it is written in a functional style, and in Haskell. I haven’t had to do anything hacky to make it work, so for now I’m pleased with the code. However, I’m still learning and I wouldn’t recommend the code specially to anyone willing to learn gamedev in a functional way. Some people with more experience than me have told me that the code is OK, so there is that too.
The original plan was to make a game jam type of game, so I don’t get in one of my “4 to 6 months” projects when I’m still not sure what I’m doing. Besides, it is a game for PC and not an 8-bit system, so there may not be much interest to play it when it is finished, so I didn’t want to invest too much time on it!
But then my boys are excited and suggesting ideas, so we shall see! For now it is a simple “collect them all to get to next stage” type of arcade platformer, and when I have a sufficient game I may just release and leave it there. You can watch a short video of the game –in Mastodon–.
Then all the lessons learned could be used to start an actual special project, with more of a plan and hopefully more chances of completing despite being a larger commitment.