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 XML file


We've been working with XML many times over the course of this book. Any time we needed to change project settings, we had edited the Project.xml file. Now we're going to see how to use our own XML file.

The strings.xml file will allow us to change all text in the game from one spot, so if there's a typo somewhere, you won't have to hunt through the codebase to find it. This will also make it easier to translate the game into another language, as you can swap out the XML with a translated version very quickly.

Looking at the file's contents

Let's have a look at the strings.xml file to see what's in it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<data>
  <string id="TAP_TO_START"><![CDATA[- TAP TO START -]]></string>
  <string id="HEALTH"><![CDATA[HEALTH: ]]></string>
  <string id="SCORE"><![CDATA[SCORE: ]]></string>
  <string id="BEST_SCORE"><![CDATA[BEST SCORE: ]]></string>
  <string...