Book Image

Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials

By : Sean Scaplehorn
Book Image

Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials

By: Sean Scaplehorn

Overview of this book

Modern mobile devices are capable of supporting video games of amazing quality but there are so many different devices and platforms how can you support them all? The answer is to use the Marmalade SDK to write your code once and deploy it to all popular mobile platforms at the touch of a button.Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials will provide you with everything you need to know to transfer your existing C++ videogame programming knowledge to mobile devices. From graphics and sound to input methods and actual deployment to device, this book covers the lot.Learn how to make use of keys, touch screen and accelerometer inputs for controlling your game.Take the pain out of supporting a varied range of target devices, both across multiple platforms and multiple specifications.Step by step from "Hello World" to a complete game, this book will show how to use the Marmalade SDK to develop games for mobile devices.Learn how to make dazzling 2D and 3D games complete with fully animated characters, music and sound effects that can be deployed to all the leading mobile platforms, whilst ensuring it can run on a wide range of possible devices, from low specification to high end.If you want to join the exciting world of mobile videogames then Learning Mobile Game Development with Marmalade will show you how to do so, fast!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 9. Adding Social Media and Other Online Services

Modern mobile devices are now amazingly powerful when it comes to graphics and sound, but perhaps the biggest differentiator between them and other dedicated hand-held videogame systems is that most of them are able to connect to the Internet.

While other gaming systems may be able to go online via WiFi, many modern devices can also use a 3G or other such data connections to connect to the Internet wherever the user happens to be. For this reason many games now feature the ability to connect to social media sites such as Facebook, or to share scores using services such as Apple's Game Center.

In this chapter, we will be looking at how it is possible to use Marmalade to add the following online capabilities to our games:

  • Launching a web browser to display a web page

  • Integrating with Facebook on iOS and Android

  • Familiarizing ourselves with the possibilities for other online functionality, including advertising and in-app purchasing