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

Game resources


Images, sounds, and other game data files are called resource files. For this game, we will need quite a few. With Monkey, all resource files have to be stored inside a subfolder of your project with a name such as yourGameName.data. For CometCrusher, we will need the following types of resource files:

  • Player ship image

  • Shield image

  • Comet images

  • Bullet image

  • Explosion particle image

  • Background star image

  • Bitmap font image to draw game stats

  • Explosion sound

  • Shot sound

So, let's go over these different types of resources, and how you could create them.

Images

Almost every game needs some graphics. In the initial chapters, we have used graphical primitives such as rectangles, circles, and lines. Monkey can draw these out of the box. For CometCrusher, we will now use images.

Inkscape is a very good freeware software. It's a vector drawing program in the style of Adobe Illustrator. The graphics for CometCrusher were created with it and then exported from it in the PNG file format. To...