Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5. Coding Games
In this chapter, we deal with programming languages to create mobile games. It is
a very rich topic that cannot be entirely discussed in a single chapter dedicated to
mobile game development, though we will give you all the information needed to ap-
proach the matter, and provide useful hints to find the programming language that
best fits your needs to develop mobile games.
We begin with a general discussion on the characteristics of programming languages
and then we describe the most useful languages to create games for the mobile mar-
ket. We end the chapter with the description of the program structure of a game.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
• Main features of programming languages
• C++
• Java
• Scripting languages
• Game programming for mobile
• Objective-C
• HTML5
• The game structure
Main
features
of
programming
languages
A programming language is an artificial language used to create programs that ex-
press precise algorithms to make a computer perform computations.
Programming languages allow the manipulation of data structures and the flow of ex-
ecution of a program.
There are several different kinds of programming languages, which differ in many as-
pects, the most important of them being the computations they are capable of, also
known as the
expressive power
of a programming language.
