Game Development in Haskell

There are two Atari Asteroids clones I created for the purposes of my thesis about gamedev in Haskell.

They both differ from the original in some ways, more about them beneath the installation instructions.

The thesis

The pdf document is in the root direcotry of the repository. There is also a submodule with all the sources the pdf was built from using LaTeX.

The thesis as it was submitted is also available with reviews of the supervisor and the reader in the MUNI archive with all of its atachments. Despite some room for improvement, the defense was successful and the thesis received an A.

Installation of the games

The Haskell Tool Stack is required for installation. You also need the SDL libraries, which can be installed like this:

• On Ubuntu

  sudo apt install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev libsdl2-image-dev
  

• On Windows

  stack exec -- pacman -S mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2 mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2_ttf mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2_image
  

Note: you don't need SDL Image if you are only interested in trying pure-asteroids.

If you have the SDL libraries, run stack build in the directory of the game you want to install. This may take a while. stack exec name-of-the-executable (I find this process doesn't work on my windows machine for some reason that I haven't looked into yet).

• On Ubuntu

  stack build
  stack exec <project-name>-exe
  

• On Windows

  stack build
  stack exec <project-name>-exe
  

  For some reason I have issues with stack build on Windows so alternatively, you can use stack ghci and run the main function yourself from there.

  stack ghci
  main
  

About the games

Both games are decently close to the original Asteroids but there are several details that are different or not implemented. Both games have identical features with the exception of hAsteroids using loaded textures and pure-asteroids drawing lines in the code instead. The gameplay is slighly different but the rules and general behaviour is the same.

• hAsteroids

  Clone of Atari Asteroids using apecs.

  

  Serves as an example of monad-everything aproach.

  Currently in a "good enough" state.

  Could use some refactoring.

• pure-asteroids

  Clone of Atari Asteroids with focus on safe pure functions and "pure" vector graphics :)

  

  Serves as an example of "monad bad" extreme approach.

  Currently in a "good enough" state.

  Some refactoring is needed and there is few features I consider optional for the purposes of my thesis but which would be nice.

For more details look into the thesis :)

Acknowledgements

• Dino Rush - great blog post about a great attempt at Haskell gamedev

• Ashley Smith's blog that has a lot of insight on games in Haskell and Apecs

• Font used: Computer Speak by Shaan Sawrup

• SDL2 bindings for Haskell

• Apecs: a fast, type-driven Entity-Component-System library for game programming by Jonas Carpay

  • with a great demo/tutorial

Interesting "bedtime" reads/watches :)

• The famous Why Functional Programming Matters
• Monads For Functional Programming
• Simon P. Jones' talk - Escape from the ivory tower: the Haskell journey