Book Image

Learning Libgdx Game Development

By : Andreas Oehlke, Andreas Oehlke
Book Image

Learning Libgdx Game Development

By: Andreas Oehlke, Andreas Oehlke

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 2. Cross-platform Development – Build Once, Deploy Anywhere

In this chapter you will learn more about the generated Eclipse projects and how they work together. Also, you will learn more about the following components of the Libgdx framework:

  • Backends

  • Modules

  • Application Life-Cycle and Interface

  • Starter Classes

At the end of this chapter, you will take a closer look at the demo application and inspect the generated code of the Main class in great detail. You will learn how to set breakpoints, run the application in debug mode, and speed up your overall productivity with the awesome JVM Code Hot Swapping feature. The discussion on the demo application ends with some simple and fun modifications to the code accompanied by a demonstration of the JVM Code Hot Swapping feature.

After completing this chapter you will be able to deploy, run, and debug the demo application from Chapter 1, Introduction to Libgdx and Project Setup on a desktop (including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X), on Android...