Book Image

Haxe Game Development Essentials

Book Image

Haxe Game Development Essentials

Overview of this book

Haxe is a powerful and high-level multi-platform language that's incredibly easy to learn. Used by thousands of developers and many high-profile companies, Haxe is quickly emerging as a forerunner in the area of cross-platform programming. OpenFL builds on top of Haxe to make developing for multiple platforms quick and painless. HaxeFlixel provides you with the tools you need to build amazing 2D games easier than ever before. Cross-platform development has been supercharged using the Haxe programming language, making it increasingly easy and hassle-free to develop multi-platform games. If you've programmed games before and want to learn out how to deliver games across multiple platforms, or develop games faster, then Haxe Game Development Essentials is the book for you. It starts by showing you how to set up your development environment, then running you through some Haxe language fundamentals, and finally taking you through the process of programming a game from start to finish. You will learn how to create a side scrolling shooter game using HaxeFlixel. Next you will learn to enhance the game with new gameplay features, user interfaces, animations, sound, and configuration files to make your game expandable. Once your game is built and ready, you will learn how to deploy it to web, Android, iOS, and desktop systems. By the end of this book, you will be confident about creating multi-platform games using Haxe, OpenFL, and HaxeFlixel in a faster and easier way.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Haxe Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Setting up a new HaxeFlixel project


Now that we've gone over the basics of the Haxe language, we'll start working on the foundation of our game. The game we're going to make is a side scrolling space shooter similar to games like R-Type or Gradius. It will be much simpler than those games, but by the end of this book you will have the skills you need to take the game to that level of complexity.

To keep the game fun, we'll add a goofy twist: you'll control a walrus with a raygun and a jetpack, and your enemies will be rocket-powered space cats. We'll name this game Star Walrus!

To start, we're going to keep it simple and have enemies that spawn in that you click on to increase your score until a timer runs out. This will help with learning the fundamentals.

Creating the new project

Like in our Hello World example, we'll start by making a new project using the command line. So, open up a command or terminal window, navigate to the folder that you want game's folder to be in, and type in this...