Book Image

Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium

By : Christian Brousseau
Book Image

Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium

By: Christian Brousseau

Overview of this book

Smartphones and tablets have really changed the technological landscape over the last 3-4 years. Much like the web did in the last decade, these powerful tools have changed the way people communicate and access information. Such a wide market creates opportunities for developers who have the skills to develop mobile applications. "Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium" is a practical, step-by-step guide to building iPhone, iPad, and Android applications using JavaScript. This book will give you a solid grounding of the dos and don'ts of mobile development and also covers a lot of the functionalities offered by the Titanium platform. This book begins with a look at what the Titanium platform has to offer. By taking you through clear tutorials on developing each application step-by-step, it helps you to apply your newly acquired knowledge afterwards. The difficulty level gradually increases along the course of the book. Each application from this book covers different aspects of mobile development. Every chapter starts by defining the application's features as well as the user interface structure. Every single code section is then explained and put into context allowing you to gain a clear understanding of their purpose and functionality. The book takes a “small milestone” approach, allowing you to actually run the application and see the progression. Every step is accompanied by many screenshots so you can see the expected result on screen. You will learn everything you need to know to develop your very own mobile applications. The book takes a laid-back approach to Titanium development and provides information in a way designed to never overwhelm the reader with information and also uses clear diagrams, screenshots, and tips throughout.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Venture around the map


We can now move on the heart of the game itself, moving our hero around the map. This section will address concepts that are pretty common in game development, such as:

  • Sprites

  • Game loops

  • Scrolling

  • Positioning

  • Speed calculation

No directional pad, but that's okay

Anybody who has ever held a typical smartphone will have surely noticed that there is nothing that can act as a controller; there's no trackball and there are no directional buttons. That's not a problem; we'll just build our own.

To do this, we will use an image that will act as a controller for our game. A Virtual Directional Control Pad (V-Pad), similar to the following diagram, will allow us to move our hero in every direction:

Creating our V-Pad

The V-Pad creation code is pretty straightforward; we will be using a sprite. A sprite is a two-dimensional image that can be shown on the screen. Think of it as a more powerful image view if you will.

We will create our sprite using the createSprite function and pass our...