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

Moai Hosts


One of the key concepts behind Moai SDK is that of hosts.

This is a neat solution that the folks from Zipline proposed for Moai SDK and basically states that Moai SDK provides a Lua interpreter and a C++ interface to the outside world. This interface is called AKU , and can be found in the Moai SDK source code.

Whenever you want to create a game for a specific platform, your host is in charge of configuring the input and sending input events to Moai, solving any threading issues from that platform, and also providing all platform-specific logic and Lua extensions along with an OpenGL canvas for rendering.

In this way, a game built in Moai is potentially deployable to all platforms that support C++ and OpenGL (well, not all OpenGL, just a subset of it, such as OpenGL ES), and those being industry standards, there is hardly any limitation.

Moai SDK is shipped with sample hosts for Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, and Google's Native Client. You should be able to modify these hosts,...