--- 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.