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

Creating an Android app


Ok, so far and till this point, you could have tested everything as an HTML5 application. For the development process, this works, but with mobile devices you should also start testing on a device very early. They have much less computing power than a desktop PC. And if you run into a performance problem, well you can only detect this on the device.

Anyway, when you build and transfer your app onto a device, it will always have the name Monkey Game, by default, and a default icon. For sure, you want to change that.

Changing icons

Google has a pretty good description of how icons have to be designed for certain usage. At the time of writing this book, the information is available at: http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/icon_design.html.

There, under Providing Density-Specific Icon Sets, is described which sizes they should have. Basically, you need three icons, 36 x 36, 48 x 48, and 72 x 72 pixels, in dimension. So, create these three icons as...