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

Lua and C++


Another interesting feature behind Moai is the that you have access to both Lua and C++ to develop your game.

After setting up your nodes and actions using Lua, Moai SDK runs the simulation using native code written in C++. This means that you get the best of both worlds—the flexibility of Lua and the speed of C++.

All the platform-specific stuff (for example, handling the accelerometer on a smartphone) should be handled natively and connected to Moai SDK using a Lua extension or input events (check how hosts configure AKU, search for the AKUSetInputDevice* family of methods).

This is a key concept for Moai SDK development, because you can see that there is no limit to what libraries you can use with Moai SDK. It's just a matter of taking the time to write a Lua extension for it, and Bam! It's available in the scripting environment; you can combine the library functionality with your already existing game.

Aside from this, there is always the interpreted versus compiled native code...