Nikki and the Robots: Open Source Videogame Written in Haskell | Hacker News Reader

Nikki and the Robots: Open Source Videogame Written in Haskell

joyridelabs.de

66 pointsswannodette15 comments

So I was playing and I missed a jump and I fell. And then Nikki kept falling and falling and falling. I was wondering when she would stop falling and declare me dead. And then I realized, "this is Haskell, she will fall forever."

Well, at least its functional.

I realize this isn't related to the game, but I found it entertaining that the Haskell bindings to Chipmunk, the 2D physics engine is called .... (waitforit) Hipmunk.

Very glad that someone's trying to make a game in Haskell that goes beyond a weekend hacking project. That said, on my OS X system, the arrow keys didn't work. A common complaint about Haskell is that doing "game-like" stuff (updating game state, bullet positions, ai, etc.) is hard. I don't think that's necessarily true, but this game is going to need some basic testing if it's going to do anything to dispel the notion.

> A common complaint about Haskell is that doing "game-like" stuff

I doubt some user-input issue on the Mac, in the alpha release, is to do with difficulties in the correct design for updating shared state, in a purely functional way... (they're probably using STM anyway (I would)).

> Don't hestitate to report any bugs that you experience to the bugtracker!

  > difficulties in the correct design for updating shared state, in a purely functional way

can you elaborate on the right way? i think the choice to write a game in a functional language is interesting, because games are inherently about managing state, and functional languages are all about not using state.

At least Haskell orients towards shared-state concurrency, where the state is the thin layer of communication between many stateless threads, using mechanisms like transactional memory to manage the shared resource.

I looked at the source - they are using Hipmunk for the physics engine, a Haskell binding to Chipmunk (a physics library in C) to store state like object positions. Things like updating positions of objects occur in the IO monad.

The UI is done using a custom Qt Haskell binding, and it looks like the key mapping to key translation is hard-coded - possibly the cause of key problems on Mac if they key codes are different to what it is expecting.

LGPL. http://joyridelabs.de/game/code/ http://code.joyridelabs.de/nikki/src/

http://code.joyridelabs.de/nikki/src/Game/Scene.hs http://code.joyridelabs.de/nikki/src/Game/MainLoop.hs

Sorta reminds me of Raincat, another cute Haskell platformer: http://raincat.bysusanlin.com/

Gorgeous graphics. Has massive potential. Still needs a bit of polish but I think this is going to be a great game.

I don't like that once a robot lands on his head you're screwed :)

Haskell in Space (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.91....) [PDF] is a good writeup of simple game development in Haskell.

Here's the course page, as well: http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~cxl/lehre/pi3.ws01/aste...

Is it my under powered laptop or is the character very slow to move around? The graphics seem plenty smooth enough but the gameplay creeks along.

Gorgeous looking game though, I look forward to trying it out again and maybe poking at the code.

Coole Sache, Jungs!

Kid-tested, kid-approved.

Nice!

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