Talk: (English)
Cleaning the big picture
Creating maintainable mobile games in Haskell
As game-app developers we want to create many games that are easy to maintain. Creation and maintenance gets easier when we can focus on:
- a small amount of game specific differences when handling a specific game.
- the commonalities of all games when handling many or all games.
In the last two years, while creating mobile games in Haskell for Android and iOS at Keera Studios, I have used, improved and created structures and methodologies which help to focus on the given programming task at hand. In fact, the most important and effective part of my daily work of creating easy maintainable games is stepping back, ‘cleaning’ the code of our apps by introducing these structures and methodologies.
In this talk, I will use interactive examples to show the effects of frequent code cleaning, like:
- Simplification of the code.
- Minimization of app specific code through the use of existing and new libraries.
- Facilitation of bug hunting.
- Increase of comprehensibility, usability, reliability and persistence.
- Facilitation of participation.
By sharing these experiences, I want to provide you with techniques that help to improve the maintainability of your work and I hopefully can make it obvious that the short term tedious task of stepping back and ‘cleaning’ code is a very powerful tool to be more effective in the long term.
Christina Zeller
Christina enjoys diversity in her life which makes her work as creator of mobile games in Haskell for Android and iOS at Keera Studios a perfect match. The start-up gives her the opportunity to be part of the complete live cycle of the apps (e.g., game and graphics design, programming, profiling, testing, marketing) while enjoying the freedom of working wherever and whenever she wants—for example at the sunny Spanish beach at 8 am.
Her background in educational science, psychology and computer science, and her experience as research and teaching assistant in the area of cognitive science is an inspiring source for creating apps. Recently, she complements this background with photography and volunteering at an Impact Hub.
Among her recent goals are:
- the investigation and discussion of Haskell in real world applications.
- the creation of beautiful games (in programming and player perspective).
- the education with games in a natural, positive and playful way.
- making the world a better place.
- Slides
- christina-zeller.pdf
