Scala’s LibGDX: A Report from the Trenches
Session Abstract
Java has LibGDX. Scala has powerful platforms, but not the same game-development story. SGE is my attempt to close that gap. This talk is about the engineering needed to make one Scala codebase run across desktop, browser, native and Android targets.
Session Description
In this talk I will describe how the initial goal of building a Scala game engine with LibGDX-like reach led to a series of deeper platform-engineering problems: how to port a large Java ecosystem with LLMs without trusting them blindly, how to track source parity, tests and coverage, how to build sbt tooling for multi-architecture JVM packaging and Scala Native cross-compilation, and how to ship native dependencies with the right linker flags for each platform.
The audience will see SGE as a case study in ambitious multi-platform Scala: what works today, what fights back, and what still needs to improve. The talk is not mainly about game design. It is about the infrastructure required to make Scala usable for desktop, browser, native and Android applications from one codebase.
