Book Image

Developing Mobile Games with Moai SDK

By : Francisco Tufró
Book Image

Developing Mobile Games with Moai SDK

By: Francisco Tufró

Overview of this book

<p>Moai SDK is a fast, minimalist, open-source Lua mobile framework for pro game developers. Moai is built around Lua, a common programming language for games, and offers a single open-source platform for both the front-end elements seen by consumers and the back-end infrastructure.<br /><br />Developing Mobile Games with Moai SDK will guide you through the creation of two game prototypes in a step-by-step way, giving you the basic tools you need in order to create your own games.<br /><br />Developing Mobile Games with Moai SDK introduces the basic concepts behind game development, and takes you through the development of a tile-based memotest, and a platform game prototype as well. You'll end up with a good codebase to start writing your own games.</p> <p>You will learn some tricks that come from real life experience while creating a small framework that will allow you to display images, play sounds, grab input, and so on. You'll also learn how to implement physics using Box2D bindings, and everything in Lua, without having to use any compilations. After doing this, we'll take a look at how to deploy your game to iOS and run it on an iPhone.</p> <p><br />With this book, you should be ready to go and create your own game, release it to the Apple Store, and have enough tools to dig deeper into Moai SDK.</p>
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Developing Mobile Games with Moai SDK
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
7
Concentration Gameplay
Index

Why Moai SDK?


It's safe enough to say that almost every single platform nowadays supports C++ and some flavor of OpenGL. That's the starting point for Moai SDK.

Moai SDK is a multi-platform game development framework. It's been developed in C++ and all of its features are accessible through Lua. What does this mean? That you can build your game completely in Lua (taking advantage of the flexibility of this amazing language) and, in case you need low-level access, you can always switch to C++ and do whatever you want. You can even bind your C++ libraries to use them in your game, in Lua. It has built-in access to Moai Cloud as well, which is a cloud service that allows you to deploy server-side code written in Lua, with databases, support for push notifications, leaderboards, and other fancy stuff. Note that the language is the same for your game and for your server-side code, nice.

In short, if XYZ platform supports OpenGL and C++, Moai SDK is likely to be supported by it.

Currently Moai SDK works on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and Native Client.

Anyway, there are many game engines that support multi-platform development. Many of them come with flashy interfaces, others with half of your problems solved, such as one-click deployment. So, what does Moai SDK bring to this world that has not been done yet? Freedom.

  • It's open source, you can download the code and do whatever you want with it.

  • It's free, no hundreds of dollars in licenses.

  • It doesn't tell you how to do things. It's aimed at pro developers who want to do things their way.

  • It has been used by several large-scale commercial games.

So these are the main principles behind Moai SDK's philosophy. A great mix for a great game.