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

Creating 2D arrays


In this game, we want to store the tile map information inside a two-dimensional array. If you don't know what a 2D array is, imagine a table. The first dimension is represented by the rows and the second dimension by the columns. A 1D array is comparable with a table with just one column and several rows.

Here are two illustrations that show the difference:

In the preceding image, you see an array with one dimension. It has just one column and the data is stored in a sequence, row after row. The following image shows an array with two dimensions. The difference here is that the second dimension is achieved by another column. You have two slots per row to store data. Actually, you will have as many slots per row as you define.

To access an array, here are small examples:

Print (my1Darray[2]) 'With the array above, this will print 4
Print (my2Darray[0][1]) 'With the array above, this will print 5

Note

Hint: Arrays in Monkey are zero-based. This means that the first index of...