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 [1] http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~psxip1/ On 13 June 2017 at 17:47, Baa wrote:

Hello, Ivan. Would you like to describe: how big is your game in Megabytes without any compression (interesting is binaries, not sprites, media, etc assets)? And how many time/human resources did you spent to release it?

--- Best regards, Paul

...

Dear all

(I hope this is not seen as spam. My sincere apologies if you see it as such.)

This is just to let you know that we have released a Haskell game for iOS on the App Store.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/magic-cookies/id1244709871

There is also an Android version [1]. It's the same Haskell code with just a few minor adaptations [2] (the iOS version is actually simpler). Issues with either version can be reported online [3].

I hope this is seen as yet another step reached by Haskell. This game is written in the FRP variant Yampa, and uses SDL2 for graphics. While the game is not open source, we've had to extend existing Haskell libraries and tools to make this possible. These changes will now be sent as pull requests to the corresponding projects.

We have also developed in-house tooling to make the development, compilation and deployment process for mobile platforms smooth [4]. Recompiling and deploying a new version online is now automatic and takes less than 1 minute. These tools also run directly on Travis and publish new versions of our games directly to stores. We have already started distributing our toolchain to private users, and our plan is to release immediately.

We'd like to thank all the users who tried the game before the release, many during Zurihac last weekend. Also, many thanks to the people who worked on GHC and the ARM backends over the years, and to all those who work daily to make Haskell better. We really mean that.

Once again, I hope this is not seen as spam, but as something worth celebrating.

And, also, that you enjoy playing.

Best wishes

Ivan

-- Keera Studios

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.keera.ga mes.magiccookies

[2] https://www.facebook.com/keerastudios/photos/a.3013262232162 44.89053.300854939930039/1701909406491245/?type=3

[3] https://github.com/keera-studios/magic-cookies

[4] http://keera.co.uk/blog/2017/06/01/haskell-android-ios/

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