We are extremely happy to announce that we now have several Haskell games working on Android, including our Graphic Adventure engine. Also, we have just begun beta-testing one of the games with real users via Google Play (aka. the Android Market). ...

Last week we published a blog post briefly outlining several steps of optimization of a Haskell game. In the article, the last two steps, which referred to parallelism and concurrency respectively, were inverted, making it sound like the Android version was using the parallel library. ...

Haskell is often advertised as fast, easy to parallelize and to optimize. But how much of that is really true? We are going to demonstrate it using a game we are building, including how many changes we had to introduce to increase the game speed by 700% on desktop, how we managed to go from increasing memory consumption in the order of hundreds of megabytes down to constant memory consumption of only 3MB. We’ll also see the impact it had on Android. ...

Earlier this month, Henrik Nilsson & Ivan Perez presented a tutorial at PPDP 14 on Declarative Game Programming. The goal was to show how real game programming is possible in a purely functional, declarative way. One way of doing so, seeing games as networks of interconnected signals and signal transformers, results in clear, reusable, modular code. To illustrate these ideas, a small but realistic game was demonstrated, featuring many of the complex elements found in arcade games: SDL graphics and sound, Wiimote controller, and differentiated subsystems for rendering and sound, game input, physics/collisions, game logic, etc. The game has several levels, each with its own background and music. To help others interested in functional game programming, all the talk material have been made available, including the slides and the full game code. ...