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

Loading and tracking assets


The next step after making assets, such as making our texture atlas available to the game, is to load and use them. Loading an asset such as a texture can be as simple as the following line of code:

    Texture texture = new Texture(Gdx.files.internal("texture.png"));

In the preceding example, we ask Libgdx to get an internal file handle to the texture.png file. Invoking an internal file means that Libgdx has to resolve the file's path by scanning the assets folder of the game. Then, the handle is passed over as an argument to the constructor of the Texture class to instantiate a new object of this type. This texture instance can now be directly rendered to the screen with another line of code, as shown in the following listing:

    batch.draw(texture, x, y);

Obviously, working with assets is basically very easy. However, this matter becomes a lot more complicated when we want to use several assets. It gets even worse if want to run the game on Android. As we have...