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

Managing multiple screens


We will now make some minor changes to our current class diagram to reflect the support for multiple screens that we want to add to our game.

Note

You might want to take a peek at the previous class diagram of Canyon Bunny for a quick refresher. See Chapter 3, Configuring the Game for the diagram.

Take a look at the following updated class diagram:

What has been changed here is that CanyonBunnyMain no longer implements the ApplicationListener interface that is used by Libgdx to control the flow of the application. Instead, CanyonBunnyMain now extends Libgdx's Game class, which in turn implements the ApplicationListener interface. The Game class provides a setScreen() method. Calling this method allows us to change the current screen to another one.

Every screen that we want to have in our game is encapsulated in a separate class and ends with *Screen. This is just a naming convention in this project and you are free to do it differently, of course. There are also three...