I wanted to play a bit with SDL, and it's always good to step away from actually working on EclipseFP to use it for a "real" project. So I wrote a very primitive game using SDL and SDL_TTF. It's a typing speed game (hence the, ahem, clever pun on the name: TypeClass): you see letters scrolling down the screen and you need to type them, and of course they go faster and faster. Maybe my children will learn to type with it. Maybe not.
I had SDL installed earlier, but of course SDL_TTF proved challenging on my windows machine, but I think it's was all my fault, I probably didn't read the instructions properly or something. Anyway, I only forgotten to set the LIBS variable. When I ran export LIBS=/usr/local/lib/libSDL_ttf.dll.a in my MSYS environment then configure worked fine!
Afterwards it was all plain sailing, really. Just remember to add enableUnicode True in your initialization code so you can get the actual Unicode character typed (I'm on a French keyboard, so typing M gives me the SDL key ;). And of course you need a font file, so I include a GNU FreeFont file with the package. It needs to be in the same folder as the executable.
For some reason, after seeing code that was blocking for SDL events in a loop, I started building the game with two threads, one blocking for events and one looping and drawing, and a MVar in the middle. It worked, but rewriting it in a single normal game loop: process event, update game state, draw made things a lot easier.
This brilliant piece of software that has already made its mark in video game history can be found on Hackage here!
As usual, all feedback is welcome. Possible enhancements are a high score screen, difficulty levels, choosing letters by frequency in English, using Markov chains so that the flow of letters look more natural... The list is infinite!
