Book Image

Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials

By : Sean Scaplehorn
Book Image

Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials

By: Sean Scaplehorn

Overview of this book

Modern mobile devices are capable of supporting video games of amazing quality but there are so many different devices and platforms how can you support them all? The answer is to use the Marmalade SDK to write your code once and deploy it to all popular mobile platforms at the touch of a button.Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials will provide you with everything you need to know to transfer your existing C++ videogame programming knowledge to mobile devices. From graphics and sound to input methods and actual deployment to device, this book covers the lot.Learn how to make use of keys, touch screen and accelerometer inputs for controlling your game.Take the pain out of supporting a varied range of target devices, both across multiple platforms and multiple specifications.Step by step from "Hello World" to a complete game, this book will show how to use the Marmalade SDK to develop games for mobile devices.Learn how to make dazzling 2D and 3D games complete with fully animated characters, music and sound effects that can be deployed to all the leading mobile platforms, whilst ensuring it can run on a wide range of possible devices, from low specification to high end.If you want to join the exciting world of mobile videogames then Learning Mobile Game Development with Marmalade will show you how to do so, fast!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Example code


The following sections give an overview of the sample projects accompanying this chapter.

The Flag project

This example demonstrates playing back both a main and sub-animation. A flag is rendered waving in a virtual breeze. Every few seconds the flagpole will wobble around but the flag on the end of the pole will continue to flap around. A screen grab can be seen in the following figure:

The animation of the flag waving is achieved as a looping sub-animation, while the flagpole wobble is the main animation, which is started every five seconds as a one-shot animation.

One of the problems with this approach is that the sub-animation will only play if there is a main animation currently in progress. Rather than create a one frame animation of the flagpole standing still, a cunning trick has been employed.

The flagpole wobble animation is actually playing continuously, but at zero speed. Since the first frame of the wobble animation is of the pole in an upright position, we have achieved...