[Claes Worm] - Flappy, an extended variant of the flappy-bird game in OCaml

This talk is based on the codebase of 'Flappy' - an extended variant of the flappy-bird game written in OCaml.

The game was written as an example of how to write simple and purely functional games in OCaml - with an architecture resembling that of Elm's. It then also became a playground for tackling some common problems in game programming and FP; subtyping of entities and referencing entities from entities.

The focus of the talk will be:

• The Elm architecture in OCaml, or how to write a simple purely functional game in OCaml with the browser as backend
  -- The details of the architecture - what is needed
  -- What was my experience programming Flappy this way?
• How OCaml enables a unique form of typesafe subtyping of game-entities, using polymorphic variants.
• Referencing game-entities recursively in a purely functional program
  -- How entity-referencing is solved in Flappy
  -- Discussion of the problem in general, including pros and cons of solutions.
• Discussion of advantages and limitations of pure functional programming for games

The code can be found at GitHub: https://github.com/rand00/flappy