Hi
(I responded to Paul/Baa separately, but maybe this will be of interest to others?)
Time:
We started this game at the end of 2014, beta tested on Google Play in January 2015, and launched for Android in February 2015. Since then we debugged, rewrote the game's engine completely, and launched for iOS. Both in time and in number of commits, for this particular game, the effort we put after the launch far exceeds the time we put before. The Android ecosystem is quite heterogeneous, and we saw the game crash only in very specific models but not others. This usually had to do with either the RTS or threads. (I wrote this game in other languages before 2014: Java, Scala,
frege. But integration was not good enough, compilation was not good
enough, and they could only target JVM.)
Nevertheless, while it may seem like a simple game, we were among the first to attempt any of this for real. Even more time went into prior games that we threw out, and in making the tools work. We invested so much time in developing tools, libraries and examples to make Haskell game/apps for mobile easy to produce! This is not apparent in the game. Actually, someone wrote last year asking if we'd closed down (ouch!).
Writing this and other Haskell games and apps let us understand strengths/weaknesses of Haskell and FRP. That's been also the focus of my PhD [1]. We can't tell people that Haskell "can" be used for real games or apps,
give them some tools, and walk away. Many paper examples break under real conditions. When we write games, we also
"put the money where our mouths are". Even if this game is not
successful in the end, it's given us a lot of experience. We have other, more complex games in the store (one being beta-tested, another is still in development). We are also writing apps. And introducing testing facilities. I hope the effort pays off.
I'm really happy with the current state of things: new apps can be created
superquickly, and from my machine (I have everything cached) they
take less than 1 minute to recompile and upload to the store. It's is a one-liner :) We are creating playable demos and apps in hours/days. And these do not only work on iOS/Android,
but also on desktop and web. I've personally been looking for people and companies interested in
doing this together. FP and non-FP. Not (just) customers, but also long-term partners that believe in this. And I've been looking for people to work on maintaining the Android/iOS backends, which is super-hard. I know others have too, and I'm hoping we can coordinate on this.
Size:
Currently, about 20-30MB per architecture.
All the best
Ivan