Category Archives: Moai

Interesting Links

Here are some interesting links I found while doing research on Moai:

General set of Moai tutorials to cover display, handling input  – You should definitely go through these to get an idea of how the basics work.

Moai SDK Documentation – This covers the classes and functions that are defined on them.  Note that the documentation here is incomplete – there are some classes that don’t show anything.  There is enough that this is still useful though.

Moai Code Snippits – Some utility functions that are nice to know about.

Tools that work with Moai – Links to various programs that you can use with Moai (IDE’s, drawing programs, etc)

Moai Wiki

More Moai Code Snippits – A place where people dump code snippits.  More sippits than the other link, but this website is sometimes down because it goes over its host’s limit.

Moai Forums – Official Moai forums, where a lot of questions get answered.

Here are some other tutorials that might be a good reference:

Tutorial to setup Moai for Windows and Android

Tutorial to get started with Moai

Getting setup with Moai

Installing the SDK

Moai’s website has most of what you need to get started.  You’ll need to sign up to get to the download link, which is free.  Moai is actually a few other services along with the middleware for game development.  The part you are looking for is the Moai SDK.  The other services are related to cloud services, which start free but ramp up as usage increases.  I haven’t really looked into that part of things, but it might be something to consider in the future.  Once you download the SDK, unzip it somewhere.  I ended up putting it into a subdirectory of “My Documents”, since there are a lot of .bat files in the samples directory, and Windows 8 complains if you try to run new things out of the “Program Files” directory.  In the end it shouldn’t really matter where you have it unzipped.
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Picking Some Middleware

The Requirements

Before getting started, I spent some time evaluating a few different middleware options.  Here are some things I am looking for:

Cross-platform

I want to be able to develop and publish at the very least on PC and iOS.  The Apple appstore seems relatively easy to get into, and even if it gets lost in all the other games out there, at least I can direct my friends to it and have something to show.  Distribution on the PC is a little tougher since most people just buy through Steam, and you need to apply to get in.  Also all my friends who are willing to help have PCs, and nobody else actually has the Macbook you need to even develop for iOS.  If the code can be released on Android or Mac, that would be a nice bonus, though I’m not sure I’d want to handle the support for all the different Android devices out there.
Continue reading Picking Some Middleware