Last night I gave a talk at the F#unctional Londoners meetup about my experiences working in a team building a game in a day at the recent London GameCraft game jam event. We went with a continuous runner and used XNA to build the game on Windows with a hack to get it working on Visual Studio 2012, then Neil Danson was able to port it to iOS and Android using MonoGame. I brought along an Apple iPad and Google Nexus 7 both happily running the game.
iOS and Android
A recent article in the Guardian suggests that iOS and Android combined now generate four times the revenue of dedicated gaming handhelds. Both Unity and MonoGame let you target those platforms. I played a little with Unity at the Rezzed game jam early in the year, and MonoGame at GameCraft. As a coder by trade I felt more comfortable with MonoGame, where Unity can get you a long way fast but it felt more designer orientated (not necessarily a bad thing).
Check out Neil’s article on F# and Monogame Part 4 – Content Pipeline
F#
At a recent QuakeCon conference veteran game developer John Carmack spent a chunk of his annual monologue extolling the virtues of functional programming. F# is a rich functional-first programming language with excellent imperative and OO features when you need them. The experience is similar to the Lua programming language, which is hugely popular in gaming, with it’s light syntax and all important coroutine support. Given that it can run cross platform I think it’s an interesting choice for Indie games development. The XBLA title Path of Go is a good example of what is possible. There’s also a book on F# game development Friendly F# (Fun with game programming).
Code Samples
Berzerk shows how to build a simple game AI using seq expressions:
let zombie target state = seq {
yield! random_pause state 10
while true do
yield! wait target state 50.0
yield! home target state 10
}
Flint Eastwood is a small game I built in 6 hours at the first Dublin GameCraft event:
Balls is a sound game, similar to Sound Drop I built last week:
The Prismer is our entry to the London GameCraft game jam:
New York, New York
If you’re interested in learning more about F# check out the Progressive F# Tutorials on 18th/19th in New York followed by a GameCraft game jam on Friday the 20th.
