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

Expanding the game


Star Walrus was a game built to help you learn Haxe; it's funny and silly, but it can be more. At the end of each chapter, I suggested ways to tweak the game or expand on what you've learned, but the sky is the limit. To help with this, I've included the original art files used to make the elements in the game. They require Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

Let's go over a few possibilities.

Level-based gameplay

Loading in predefined enemy patterns works for the quick pick up and play experience, but you could add more depth to the experience by expanding the game to take place over several predefined levels.

You've learned to work with both JSON and XML; either would be excellent to build out levels. To make your life a little easier, you could have levels composed of enemy patterns instead of making every single thing in every level unique. All you would need to do is add an id property to the patterns and reference those in an integer array.

Reusing prebuilt elements like...