Book Image

Developing Mobile Games with Moai SDK

By : Francisco Tufró
Book Image

Developing Mobile Games with Moai SDK

By: Francisco Tufró

Overview of this book

<p>Moai SDK is a fast, minimalist, open-source Lua mobile framework for pro game developers. Moai is built around Lua, a common programming language for games, and offers a single open-source platform for both the front-end elements seen by consumers and the back-end infrastructure.<br /><br />Developing Mobile Games with Moai SDK will guide you through the creation of two game prototypes in a step-by-step way, giving you the basic tools you need in order to create your own games.<br /><br />Developing Mobile Games with Moai SDK introduces the basic concepts behind game development, and takes you through the development of a tile-based memotest, and a platform game prototype as well. You'll end up with a good codebase to start writing your own games.</p> <p>You will learn some tricks that come from real life experience while creating a small framework that will allow you to display images, play sounds, grab input, and so on. You'll also learn how to implement physics using Box2D bindings, and everything in Lua, without having to use any compilations. After doing this, we'll take a look at how to deploy your game to iOS and run it on an iPhone.</p> <p><br />With this book, you should be ready to go and create your own game, release it to the Apple Store, and have enough tools to dig deeper into Moai SDK.</p>
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Developing Mobile Games with Moai SDK
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
7
Concentration Gameplay
Index

Setting up the environment


After downloading the SDK, we need to set up our environment.

Moai SDK can be used with any text editor, but if you want some fancy features such as a debugger, you'd need to use one of the IDE's that support Moai SDK. There are a bunch of them, each with different levels of integration. For a complete list, I suggest you visit Tools that work with Moai on Moai's wiki at http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=Tools_that_work_with_Moai.

In this book we'll focus on using ZeroBrane Studio, since it's open source (you can program it in Lua) and has a lot of neat features that will be useful to us (syntax highlighting, autocompletion for Moai SDK, debugging, and live coding, among others). To install it, go to http://studio.zerobrane.com and download the latest version of the software for your specific platform.

Windows

The book assumes that you've already downloaded ZeroBrane Studio (either the zip or the installer) and installed it in C:\Program Files\ZeroBraneStudio...