Preface

With the popularity of mobile app/game markets, there are also a lot of new development tools, especially cross-platform ones, that allow you to re-use the same code on multiple platforms. Gideros is a great example of such a tool.

Based on the Lua language, Gideros provides an easy way to create 2D games for both iOS and Android. With the one click on device testing and completely free of charge development, it should be one of the first choices to try out for all mobile developers.

This book provides an easy way to start developing with Gideros, explaining all its basics and how you can apply them in creating your own cross-platform game.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Setting Up the Environment, provides information on how to prepare everything to start developing using Gideros.

Chapter 2, Managing Scenes and Gideros OOP, provides an introduction to Gideros OOP and scene management using your own classes.

Chapter 3, Implementing Game Logic, describes the main game implementation, from the game elements to level and progression logic.

Chapter 4, Polishing the Game, helps you spice up your game to make it more appealing and alive by learning different Gideros features.

What you need for this book

You will need to download and install Gideros SDK, which supports Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (through WINE) operating systems. Installation and setup is covered in the first chapter.

Additionally, you will need some external Lua libraries for Gideros, which you will be able to obtain easily from links provided in relevant chapters.

Who this book is for

This book is for developers who are new to mobile game development or who have tried the native development of mobile games and were not satisfied with the complexity, speed, or huge fragmentation of supported platforms and devices.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "So let's modify our GameManager class to also manage score for each level."

A block of code is set as follows:

local musicText = TextField.new(conf.fontSmall, "Music: ")
musicText:setPosition(100, 250)
musicText:setTextColor(0xffff00)
self:addChild(musicText)

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "If music is on, we will set the Turn off text, but if music is off, we will set the Turn on text."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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