Book Image

Haxe Game Development Essentials

Book Image

Haxe Game Development Essentials

Overview of this book

Haxe is a powerful and high-level multi-platform language that's incredibly easy to learn. Used by thousands of developers and many high-profile companies, Haxe is quickly emerging as a forerunner in the area of cross-platform programming. OpenFL builds on top of Haxe to make developing for multiple platforms quick and painless. HaxeFlixel provides you with the tools you need to build amazing 2D games easier than ever before. Cross-platform development has been supercharged using the Haxe programming language, making it increasingly easy and hassle-free to develop multi-platform games. If you've programmed games before and want to learn out how to deliver games across multiple platforms, or develop games faster, then Haxe Game Development Essentials is the book for you. It starts by showing you how to set up your development environment, then running you through some Haxe language fundamentals, and finally taking you through the process of programming a game from start to finish. You will learn how to create a side scrolling shooter game using HaxeFlixel. Next you will learn to enhance the game with new gameplay features, user interfaces, animations, sound, and configuration files to make your game expandable. Once your game is built and ready, you will learn how to deploy it to web, Android, iOS, and desktop systems. By the end of this book, you will be confident about creating multi-platform games using Haxe, OpenFL, and HaxeFlixel in a faster and easier way.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Haxe Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding the JSON configuration file


Before we do anything with the movementPatterns.json file, let's understand what it will help us do and have a look at its structure. We used JSON before while importing sprite sheets, but this time, we'll be using some data designed specifically for this game.

A simple example

Previously, our enemies spawned in at random y coordinates and would move straight toward the left-hand side of the screen. Having completely randomized enemy movement can make the game feel unfair and chaotic. This may frustrate our players and prevents them from developing skills to improve their scores.

To change this, we're going to have enemies move in set patterns as follows:

In this example, we are going to have enemies spawn on the top and bottom of the screen, sweep into the middle of the screen, and sweep back to the top and bottom as they move off screen.

Looking at the JSON format

Now that we know what kind of pattern we want enemies to move in, let's have a look at...