Book Image

Monkey Game Development: Beginner's Guide

By : Michael Hartlef
Book Image

Monkey Game Development: Beginner's Guide

By: Michael Hartlef

Overview of this book

Monkey is a programming language and toolset that allows its user to develop modern 2D games easily for mobile and other platforms like iOS, Android, HTML5, FLASH, OSX, Windows and XNA. With Monkey you can create best selling games in a matter of weeks, instead of months.Monkey Game Development Beginner's Guide provides easy-to-follow step by step instructions on how to create eight different 2D games and how to deploy them to various platforms and markets. Learning about the structure of Monkey and how everything works together you will quickly create eight classical games and publish them to the modern app markets. Throughout the book you will learn important game development techniques like collision detection, handling player input with mouse, keyboard or touch events and creating challenging computer AI. The author explains how to emit particle effects, play sound and music files, use sprite sheets, load or save high-score tables and handle different device resolutions. Finally you will learn how to monetize your games so you can generate revenue.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Monkey Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
3
Game #2, Rocket Commander
4
Game #3, CometCrusher
5
Game #4, Chain Reaction
6
Game #5, Balls Out!
8
Game #7, Air Dogs 1942
9
Game #8, Treasure Chest

Compiler or translator?


Under the hood, Monkey is a translator. That means it will translate your program, which is written in the Monkey programming language, into source code for the supported target languages. And because of this, your program will be able to run on various platforms, such as iOS, Android, XNA, OSX, and Windows.

After Monkey has translated your program into source code for a certain target platform, it will then utilize native tools and SDKs (Software Development Kits) on these platforms to finish the compilation and linking process. For this, you will need to install various tools and SDKs. For example, you need to install Xcode and the iOS SDK to create iPhone apps. Or, to create a Flash app, you need to install the Flex Actionscript compiler.

The following illustration shows the process of creating an application with Monkey:

Don't worry about installing any of these SDKs and other tools for now. We will go through this together. Your default installation of Monkey can always export to HTML5 . To play HTML5 games, the only tool you need to have installed is a current version of an HTML5-compatible browser, such as FireFox, Safari, Chrome, or Internet Explorer.