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

Chapter 6. Working with Configuration Files

In this chapter, we're going to use a JSON configuration file to give enemies unique movement patterns and use an XML file to make our user interface text easily changeable. Adding movement patterns to enemies will make the game feel fairer to players instead of being purely random. This will also give us a way to easily add new content to the game without writing new code.

These two changes will also make the game updates and changes more accessible, allowing people who aren't programmers to work directly on the game.

Here's a rundown of the sections in this chapter:

  • JSON versus XML

  • Project updates

  • Understanding the JSON configuration file

  • Building the enemy spawner

  • Adding movement patterns to enemies

  • Updating PlayState

  • Understanding the XML file

  • Pulling string data from XML

  • Replacing strings