Book Image

Learning Libgdx Game Development

Book Image

Learning Libgdx Game Development

Overview of this book

Game development is a field of interdisciplinary skills, which also makes it a very complex topic in many respects. One decision that usually needs to be made at the beginning of a game development processis to define the kind of computer system or platform the game will be developed for. This does not pose any problems in general but as soon as the game should also be able to run on multiple platforms it will become a developer's nightmare to maintain several distinct copies of the same game. This is where the libGDX multi-platform game development framework comes to the rescue! "Learning Libgdx Game Development" is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with all the information you need to know about the libGDX framework as well as game development in general so you can start developing your own games for multiple platforms. You will gradually acquire deeper knowledge of both, libGDX and game development while you work through twelve easy-to-follow chapters. "Learning Libgdx Game Development" will walk you through a complete game development cycle by creating an example game that is extended with new features over several chapters. These chapters handle specific topics such as organizing resources, managing game scenes and transitions, actors, a menu system, using an advanced physics engine and many more. The chapters are filled with screenshots and/or diagrams to facilitate comprehension. "Learning Libgdx Game Development" is the book for you if you want to learn how to write your game code once and run it on a multitude of platforms using libGDX.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning Libgdx Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 12. Animations

In this chapter you will learn how to create and manage different kinds of animations using Libgdx's Actions and Animation classes. We will exemplify their usage by animating certain parts of the menu and game screen.

In regard to the menu screen, we will create time-based and event-based animations including moving, scaling, and fading Actor objects via so-called actions of the Actions class. Additionally, interpolation algorithms provided by Libgdx's Interpolation class will be used for added effects and for the smoothing of those animations.

The game screen, in a sense, is already animated according to the game logic, which takes care of coordinating the movement of every game object. However, each game object is rendered using a still image. In terms of animations, this is equivalent to a one-frame animation. With the help of the Animation class, we will define several sequences of individual frames to form animations for our game objects.