Game Development with Lua

complex GUIs and artificial intelligence. If you?re a developer just starting to use Lua, or you?re considering using it, Game Development with Lua will teach you everything you need to know. And if you?re new to scripting languages altogether, this book will also teach you how they can be used in game development effectively. Written by practicing Lua game developers, the book teaches how to use Lua for commercial game development. It begins with a brief history of Lua and explains how to incorporate Lua into a C++ project. It details the key features and advantages of Lua and then takes you through the development of a ?rapid prototype? game called Take Away. This game provides the context with which to explore the foundational C++ approaches and the Lua scripting approaches to saving and loading game data, building a modular and flexible GUI system, managing a game?s real-time events through Lua scripts, and using Lua to define and control game AI. There are also several smaller games along with a full technology base, so even non-programmers can look under the hood to see what makes a game tick. If you?re looking for an efficient, affordable, and easy-to-learn language for your games, Lua is the right choice and this book will teach you how to use it effectively.

Paul Schuytema (Monmouth, IL) has been a professional game developer for over ten years and has spoken at the past ten GDC conferences. He has produced and designed over twenty games and written more than 200 professional articles and authored or co-authored over a dozen books. He teaches college-level creative writing and journalism, and he received the Governor’s 2002 Entrepreneurial Success Award in Illinois. He was also the primary scriptor for Magic Lantern. Mark Manyen (Monmouth, IL) was most recently the technical director for Magic Lantern where he directed the technology on more than 25 games. He incorporated Lua into Magic Lantern’s J5 technology suite and created all "Lua Glue" hooks into the J5 codebase.