Brussels / 30 & 31 January 2016

schedule

Haxe : A language by gamedevs for gamedevs

Meet the indie OSS gamedev buddy!


These last years, game development have changed a lot, the proliferation of tools have made game creation way easier than before. Gamedev learning tools like Construct and Stencyl have made game development ubiquituous. But even if creating a simple game is no longer a challenge. These days there are so many options fo create your own games, even your own game engine. Then comes a big problem. Unplanned obsolescence. Every game engine dies. Every game engine that has its own crazy, crappy script variant, has its own API, its own tremors. And when it dies you might usually lose your rendering code, your shader infrastructure, your gameplay routines or your business logic.

Haxe tries to solve all these problems. It is not an engine, nor a framework. It is a language and a toolkit. Haxe compiles your code to every major languages used for game developments. Haxe pre-optimizes your code so that you focus on your game. Haxe does native compilation and allow you to bypass VM's. With its advanced type system and aggresive inlining, it can even allow jitted code to go faster than hand written code.

Whether you use Unity3D, Flash, Unreal, Haxe can bring you goodness and agility.

So let's talk about OSS and Haxe a bit!

0- OSS as a runtime...or not I'll talk about how OSS is still a great way to have the right tools to build game but I'll also talk about how OSS games themselves seems stucked in a wrong mind set. -- market structuration. -- average revenue per user. -- We need OSS game initiatives with fundings ( see https://pledgie.com/categories/games or itch.io). -- Nobody owns Haxe and most of its framework are OSS.

1- What is Haxe ? I'll talk of the language itself and its features, I'll talk of what we do at Haxe foundation and what makes Haxe a powerful tool to every gamedev whatever his tastes in beer. - A high level language. - An optimising transpiler. - A community. - Nobody's ennemy : collaborate with your favorite runtime.

2- But pragmatically, when can Haxe help me?
I'll speak about the ecology of Haxe, how an awesome language also lead to a great ecosystem. I'll give away some pragmatic examples where Haxe can add ton of value to one's project. - Unreal/Unity3d : inject external gameplay data, ubiquituous business logic - HTML5 : gain optimisations and precompilation & client/server code sharing. - Flash dying : backport your game to HTML5 or to cpp! - Prototype in HTML5, run in cpp with Kha!

3-Perspectives - They use haxe - What we did last year - We are looking for a CEO - How Haxe should grow?

4- Q&A

Speakers

David "Blackmagic" Elahee

Links