48 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
48 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Escapism
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author: nek0
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tags: english
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description: Something on GameDev
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---
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Hi again. First off all, I wish you a happy new year. Between finishing one part
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of my rehab, holidays and the Chaos Communication Congress I attended I forgot
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to write a new post here. I am deeply sorry.
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During that time I was also programming a lot, especially on my game engine and
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example games, or technical demos, for said engine. I do game development in
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Haskell. For fun.
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Why game development? Why in Haskell? These are questions I regularly hear from
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people, when they get to know me and what I do. Somehow There seems to be a
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notion, that game development is not real development and that Haskell is either
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an unfit or even impossible choice for that. Both notions are not true. Game
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development is a very complex matter (You're doing real time Simulations of a
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world) and Haskell is very fit for the Job. I could be seeing results faster in
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different languages, but that's not the languages fault. I have to write a lot
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of the tooling myself, which slows me down. But it's a great learning
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experience.
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But why do I do that? Well, I like creating and developing worlds. You can see
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that in my [writing](https://nek0.eu/tags/writing.html) section. But writing
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sometimes is limited when it comes to interaction with the world. In games the
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player usually can explore the world to a deeper level. The immersion is
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different.
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That's what I always liked about the games I played. They let me escape to a
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different world and go on my own adventures. In RPGs I could take on the role of
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a brave adventurer, in RTS games I could lead a faction to victory on the
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battlefield. Those are the game genres I mostly played.
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Nowadays I play less and less, but I do more game development. At the current
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stage my knowledge and tooling do not suffice for the kind of game I have in my
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mind for quite some time, so I try to take smaller steps. But ultimately I bring
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my escapism of past days to a new level. Now I don't escape into virtual worlds
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created by others, but I am in the process of creating them myself. Sometimes
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it's a frustrating experience, but sometimes it's awesome.
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For those of you interested in my games, I can show you at this point only
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[haskelloids](https://github.com/nek0/haskelloids). Not the most original name,
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but It's the first real game that runs on my own engine, which you can find
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[in its own Github repo](https://github.com/nek0/affection), together with some
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small example programs.
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