Book Image

Monkey Game Development: Beginner's Guide

By : Michael Hartlef
Book Image

Monkey Game Development: Beginner's Guide

By: Michael Hartlef

Overview of this book

Monkey is a programming language and toolset that allows its user to develop modern 2D games easily for mobile and other platforms like iOS, Android, HTML5, FLASH, OSX, Windows and XNA. With Monkey you can create best selling games in a matter of weeks, instead of months.Monkey Game Development Beginner's Guide provides easy-to-follow step by step instructions on how to create eight different 2D games and how to deploy them to various platforms and markets. Learning about the structure of Monkey and how everything works together you will quickly create eight classical games and publish them to the modern app markets. Throughout the book you will learn important game development techniques like collision detection, handling player input with mouse, keyboard or touch events and creating challenging computer AI. The author explains how to emit particle effects, play sound and music files, use sprite sheets, load or save high-score tables and handle different device resolutions. Finally you will learn how to monetize your games so you can generate revenue.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Monkey Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
3
Game #2, Rocket Commander
4
Game #3, CometCrusher
5
Game #4, Chain Reaction
6
Game #5, Balls Out!
8
Game #7, Air Dogs 1942
9
Game #8, Treasure Chest

Game objects


Like every game, Chain Reaction is made out of several objects. Let's go through them one by one.

Layers

In this game we will use only three layers (groups):

  • Background

  • Game

  • Title screen

These layers help us to draw the game objects in the correct order, draw only the ones needed for a certain game mode, and also reduce the amount of objects to be checked during collision detection.

Title screen

The title screen of our little game is an image with the title written on it and with a a button to start the game. As the button is already drawn on it, we will utilize a new feature of the fantomEngine, a Zone object. You can use a zone object to detect collisions on it and also check for touch events.

Game background

The game background screen will cover the whole canvas of the device. In addition, there are two buttons drawn on it that let us exit the game and restart it. Beside the actual play field, there is also a header area where the game score and the current FPS (frames per second...