C H A P T E R  2

Creating Simple Games with Sprites and Movement

Congratulations—you’ve successfully set up your development environment and are ready to move on to the more creative activities of game development. When you think of your favorite game, you can immediately conjure up what the appearance of it was, whether it included monsters running toward you or cars racing around a track. In this chapter, you breathe life into your tablet screen. With tons of games on the market, the way your game looks and feels can determine how successful it is.

This chapter covers the basics of displaying images to the tablet screen and then moving them around. You learn about the notion of sprites. For the purposes of this chapter, a sprite is any game object that can be moved around during game play. The main character in a game or one of its enemies is normally a sprite, but the game’s background isn’t.

The content in this chapter moves fairly quickly and introduces many new concepts.