---
title: Escapism
author: nek0
tags: english
description: Something on GameDev
---

Hi again. First off all, I wish you a happy new year. Between finishing one part
of my rehab, holidays and the Chaos Communication Congress I attended I forgot
to write a new post here. I am deeply sorry.

During that time I was also programming a lot, especially on my game engine and
example games, or technical demos, for said engine. I do game development in
Haskell. For fun.

Why game development? Why in Haskell? These are questions I regularly hear from
people, when they get to know me and what I do. Somehow There seems to be a
notion, that game development is not real development and that Haskell is either
an unfit or even impossible choice for that. Both notions are not true. Game
development is a very complex matter (You're doing real time Simulations of a
world) and Haskell is very fit for the Job. I could be seeing results faster in
different languages, but that's not the languages fault. I have to write a lot
of the tooling myself, which slows me down. But it's a great learning
experience.

But why do I do that? Well, I like creating and developing worlds. You can see
that in my [writing](https://nek0.eu/tags/writing.html) section. But writing
sometimes is limited when it comes to interaction with the world. In games the
player usually can explore the world to a deeper level. The immersion is
different.

That's what I always liked about the games I played. They let me escape to a
different world and go on my own adventures. In RPGs I could take on the role of
a brave adventurer, in RTS games I could lead a faction to victory on the
battlefield. Those are the game genres I mostly played.

Nowadays I play less and less, but I do more game development. At the current
stage my knowledge and tooling do not suffice for the kind of game I have in my
mind for quite some time, so I try to take smaller steps. But ultimately I bring
my escapism of past days to a new level. Now I don't escape into virtual worlds
created by others, but I am in the process of creating them myself. Sometimes
it's a frustrating experience, but sometimes it's awesome.

For those of you interested in my games, I can show you at this point only
[haskelloids](https://github.com/nek0/haskelloids). Not the most original name,
but It's the first real game that runs on my own engine, which you can find
[in its own Github repo](https://github.com/nek0/affection), together with some
small example programs.
