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

Implementing user interfaces


Every game will need some kind of user interface, even if it is just a button that can be pressed to start a new game. In this section we will take a look at how a user interface can be implemented for your own game.

The IwUI API

The Marmalade SDK ships with an API called IwUI, which allows us to create user interfaces for our projects consisting of buttons, labels, and other common controls.

This API is very feature-rich and allows interfaces to be created not just for games, but also for more serious applications. Marmalade used to ship with a tool called the Marmalade Studio UI Builder, but this is sadly no longer a supported part of the SDK. However, it is still possible to access this tool by either installing an older version of Marmalade (one of the v5.2.x releases is probably best) or by downloading its source code from https://github.com/marmalade/UI-Builder.

It is also possible to use IwUI without using the UI creation tool by constructing ITX files that...