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

Our lovely game objects


Like every game, Balls Out! is made out of several objects that may or may not have their own life, of course, only if you code them to have a life. So which objects are part of the game?

Layers

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

  • Background

  • Game

  • Title screen

The background layer will hold some info text and simple, colored rectangles. The title screen is just that with two extra buttons to start a game or to leave it completely. And the game layer will hold the main game objects, such as the balls, the enemies, and the tiles. Also, the particle effects will use the game layer. Just as a little reminder, with layers you can group sprites to handle them in one batch. Layers also control the order in which sprites are drawn.

The title screen

In this game, we will keep it simple. No bitmap image graphic was harmed for Balls Out!, this time. No starving artist had to do unpaid overtime to create the title screen. We will use just a two-colored rectangle and...