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

Using Libgdx's scene graph for the menu UI


We are now going to create the scene of the menu screen. The scene will feature a background image that fills the whole screen. There will be logos in the top-left and bottom-left corner of the screen and two clickable buttons anchored to the bottom-right corner that will trigger either a play or an options action. A gold coin and a huge image of the bunny head are also added to the scene.

The following is a screenshot of how the finished menu screen will look:

However, before we start to create this scene, we have to do some preparations in advance. First of all, we need to add the new images to our project and also make a small change to the automatic texture packing process so that we have a texture atlas for our UI.

Add a new subfolder in CanyonBunny-desktop/assets-raw/ called images-ui and copy all of the new images into this directory. After that, make the following change to Main:

  public static void main (String[] args) {
    if (rebuildAtlas...