F re e S a m p le
Community Experience Distilled
Haxe Game Development Essentials
Create games on multiple platforms from a single codebase using Haxe and the HaxeFlixel engine
Jeremy McCurdy
In this package, you will find: The author biography A preview chapter from the book, Chapter 1 'Getting Started' A synopsis of the book’s content More information on Haxe Game Development Essentials
About the Author
Jeremy McCurdy is a game developer who has been making games using ActionScript, C#, and Haxe for over four years. He has developed games targeted at iOS, Android, Windows, OS X, Flash, and HTML5. He has worked on games that have had millions of gameplay sessions, and has built games for many major North American television networks.
He is the games technical lead at REDspace, an award-winning interactive studio that has worked for some of the world's largest brands. They are located in Nova Scotia, Canada, and have been building awesome experiences for 15 years. Preface
Developing games that can reach a wide audience can often be a serious challenge. A big part of the problem is fi guring out how to make a game that will work on a wide range of hardware and operating systems. This is where Haxe comes in.
Over the course of this book, we'll look at getting started with Haxe and the HaxeFlixel game engine, build a side-scrolling shooter game that covers the core features you need to know, and prepare the game for deployment to multiple platforms.
After completing this book, you will have the skills you need to start producing your own cross-platform Haxe-driven games!
What this book covers Chapter 1, Getting Started, explains setting up the Haxe and HaxeFlixel development environment and doing a quick Hello World example to ensure that everything is working.
Chapter 2, Building a New Game, looks at the fundamentals of the Haxe language and building the core foundation of our game.
Chapter 3, Dealing with Menus and Screen Flow, helps to set up our game's UI, add simple UI animations, and control the fl ow between screens.
Chapter 4, Delving into Animations and Gameplay, explains adding sprites and scripted animations and adding the bulk of our gameplay functionality.
Chapter 5, Adding Sound, delves into the aspects of adding music and sound effects to make our animations and gameplay truly engaging.
Chapter 6, Working with Confi guration Files, talks of using JSON and XML confi guration fi les to make our game expandable and editing the text far easier. Preface
Chapter 7, Deploying to Multiple Platforms, shows how to take our completed game and build it to work on desktop, web, and mobile platforms.
Chapter 8, What's Next?, looks at game features to expand on and at resources to continue learning. Getting Started
In this chapter, we're going to see what Haxe is, how it will enable you to create awesome multiplatform games, and then we'll install all of the tools we'll need to develop with. After setting things up, we'll work with a quick Hello World example to make sure that everything works and we're ready to start making games!
Here's a rundown of the sections in this chapter: