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

Time for action — first changes to the OnCreate method


Inside the OnCreate method of a monkey app, you basically set up the game. For example, loading some graphics can be done here:

  1. 1. First set the update rate of the game to 60 frames per second.

    Method OnCreate:Int()
    SetUpdateRate(60)
    
  2. 2. Now, create an instance of the engine class.

    eng = New engine
    

    We want to work with a virtual resolution and let the fantomEngine take care of the scaling of our graphics and touch events.

  3. 3. Set the virtual canvas size to 480 x 800 with a call to the SetCanvasSize method.

    eng.SetCanvasSize(480,800)
    
  4. 4. Load the texture atlas of the atom elements.

    atlas = LoadImage("CR_Tiles.png")
    
  5. 5. Set the font1 object with our bitmap font.

    font1 = eng.LoadFont("cr_font")
    Return 0
    End
    

What just happened?

We have set the update rate of the game, set its virtual canvas size, and loaded the texture atlas for the atom elements. Some basic definition is done, but we are far from being finished.