Developing Games on the Raspberry Pi: App Programming with Lua and LÖVE

by Seth Kenlon

Learn to set up a Pi-based game development environment, and then develop a game with Lua, a popular scripting language used in major game frameworks like Unreal Engine (BioShock Infinite), CryEngine (Far Cry series), Diesel ( The Heist), Silent Storm Engine (Heroes of Might and Magic V) and many others. More importantly, learn how to dig deeper into programming languages to find and understand new functions, frameworks, and languages to utilize in your games. You’ll start by learning your way around the Raspberry Pi. Then you’ll quickly dive into learning game development with an industry-standard and scalable language. After reading this book, you'll have the ability to write your own games on a Raspberry Pi, and deliver those games to Linux, Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. And you’ll learn how to publish your games to popular marketplaces for those desktop and mobile platforms.
Whether you're new to programming or whether you've already published to markets like Itch.io or Steam, this book showcases compelling reasons to use the Raspberry Pi for game development. Use Developing Games on the Raspberry Pi as your guide to ensure that your game plays on computers both old and new, desktop or mobile.
What You'll Learn
Who This Book Is For Software engineers, teachers, hobbyists, and development professionals looking to up-skill and develop games for mobile platforms, this book eases them into a parallel universe of lightweight, POSIX, ARM-based development.

334 pages, Paperback

Published December 20, 2018

Reviews

[Seth Kenlon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm biased because I'm the author, but I was preparing a conference talk about Lua just the other day, and referred back to this book for a few ideas. I'm happy to find that it's not only a good teaching tool but an awfully good resource as well.

Once you learn how to code with Lua from this book and by reading the Lua docs as necessary, you can refer back to this volume for quick and easy reminders of how to do simple tasks. There are by no means any "recipes" in this book, but if you're coding a mobile game and can't remember how exactly to make sound effects trigger, then a quick glance at the lessons in this book that used sound effects will quickly remind you. Same goes for building your projects, or for tiling, or particle effects, and lots of other little things that you don't necessarily need to remember...until you need to remember.

I recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn how to programme, or for anyone who enjoys coding already but has never ventured into the wonderful, minimalistic world of Lua.