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

Spawning enemies


Now, let's make the function that will spawn in enemies and give them their pattern data. After the constructor, add this function:

private function spawnEnemies(timer:FlxTimer = null):Void{}

This function will be called as a timer callback and in the constructor, so it takes in a FlxTimer object that defaults to null.

Inside the function, add the following line:

currentPattern = (Math.floor(Math.random() * ((patternData.patterns.length-1) - 0 + 1)) + 0);

To start, we'll decide a random pattern to be used. We do this in the same way that we've made random ranges before. The one difference here is that we're using patternData.patterns.length to determine the maximum value. This means that we're checking the length of the patterns array from the JSON data.

Just to nail home the point, we can now use the JSON data like we would with any other object. The patterns array from JSON gets converted to an array of Haxe dynamic objects. The Json.parse function will intelligently convert...