This is part 2 of a multi-part tutorial series. For the first part, visit: Creating a Mole Whacking Game with CoronaSDK – Part 1. In this tutorial, we will learn how to move our Mole in the game and also a little about Object Oriented Programming (OOP). If this sounds scary, don’t be scared. This is just a fancy way of breaking different parts of a program into smaller parts so they can be re-used. Let’s begin…

This sample project uses the Mole Whack artwork provided Vicki Wenderlich.

1. Download the starter project from the APPlied Club projects page. Unzip the project.

2. Open the Corona Simulator and open the project in the Part 2 folder. Then open the main.lua file in Notepad++ or TextWrangler

3. We are going to move our Mole character to it’s own file so we can separate all of the code related to the mole. This will help us in the future to find any changes we need to make to the mole.

4. Create a new file called “MoleGenerator.lua” in the same folder as the main.lua file for MoleWhack. This is going to be a text file but instead of having the .txt extension, it should have the .lua extension.

5. Now open up main.lua and remove the lines that created the “myMole” object. Remove this:

   Lua

   local myMole=display.newImageRect("images/mole_1.png",178,200) myMole.x=display.contentCenterX myMole.y=display.contentCenterY

   1 2 3

   local myMole=display.newImageRect("images/mole_1.png",178,200) myMole.x=display.contentCenterX myMole.y=display.contentCenterY

6. For the time being, go down and find the following line and comment it out (that means add — to the beginning of the line):

   Lua

   myMole:toFront()

   1	myMole:toFront()

7. Your main.lua should now look like this:

   (more…)

This is part 1 of a multi-part tutorial series. For the second part, visit: Creating a Mole Whacking Game with CoronaSDK – Part 2. In this tutorial, we will learn how to begin our Mole Whacking game by placing the images on the screen.

This sample project uses the Mole Whack artwork provided Vicki Wenderlich.

1. Download the starter project from the APPlied Club projects page. Unzip the project.

2. Let's start by exploring the contents of our new project. Open the project folder and then open the images folder. Just take a look at some of the images in there to get an idea for what we have.

3. Open the Corona Simulator and open the project. Then open the main.lua file in Notepad++

4. Let's add one of the images to our simulator screen. Let's start with our "friend" the Mole. Add the following code in main.lua:

   Lua

   local myMole=display.newImageRect("images/mole_1.png",178,200)

   1	local myMole=display.newImageRect("images/mole_1.png",178,200)

5. Before I explain what this code means, save and relaunch the project. You should see a brown speck in the top left of the simulator screen. This is our mole.
   He's not really in a good place, so let's move him to the center of the screen for now so we can get a good look at him.

6. After the line we just added, let's add the two following lines to center our mole.

   Lua

   myMole.x=display.contentCenterX myMole.y=display.contentCenterY

   1 2	myMole.x=display.contentCenterX myMole.y=display.contentCenterY

7. Save and relaunch the project and you should get a much better look at our Mole. Awww, isn't he cute?

8. Ok, let's go back and look at what that code actually means:

   (more…)