For those of you interested in cross platform game development, I have recently released a game development with Moai tutorial series.


If you have never heard of it, Moai is a completely free open-source game development kit that is written in C++ and scripted using Lua. It is aimed more towards the professional game developer and has collected a fair bit of attention recently. ( It is being used to create Tim Schaffers new game, as well as the new ShadownRun title ). It isn't however, the friendliest to new learners, so that is where the tutorial series comes in.


If you are the type of person who loves the power and granularity of C++, but the syntax of a higher level language, Moai is perfect for you. Even if you aren't interested, you should check out the source code, it is literally some of the best written C++ code I have ever encountered and I've been at this a very long time.


The tutorials (and guides ) currently cover:

• Opening a window and creating a viewport
  
• Loading and displaying a sprite
  
• Touching and clicking
  
• Configuring IntelliJ IDEA to work with Moai ( makes life much easier )
  
• Build your Moai app for Android
  
• Moai configuration/Hello World
  
• Misc Lua/Moai learning resources
  

I go into a ton of detail in every tutorial, so even though Moai is a complex library, it should be accessible for beginners. Lua is *certainly* an excellent language for beginners, while experts can easily extend by modifying the host ( Java on Android, ObjC on iOS ), or dropping in to the library C++ code itself.


Please let me know what you think.

Added a tutorial. Part 4: Dealing with the Keyboard.

Added two more. Part 5 covers creating a gui with moaigui. Part 6 covers playing audio.


If you haven't checked out Moai yet, I recommend you do, it's a very cool project. If you havent checked out Lua, you really really need to.

Now a part 7 working with tile maps.

If you are looking at making a 2D tile based game, you really need to check out MOAI, it really shines at this.