Video games have been around for over 30 years now and many of us have grown up with some form of experience playing video games. Most of us will want to go on and make our own games. It has never been easier to create your own game and deliver it to the world, whether you want to make a game to share with your friends or want to start a career in the game development industry.
Owing to the ease of development, a whole host of different tools are available to help you create games. Depending on whether you want to develop for desktop, iOS, Android, or HTML5, there are different tools available. However, what if you wanted to develop for all platforms? This is where an awesome framework called LibGDX comes in.
If you are reading this book, you are probably already aware of LibGDX. You may not be proficient in it, and you may not even have used it yet. But that's OK! That's why you are reading this book. We will use LibGDX to create a series of games, each game introducing another set of features of LibGDX. Hopefully, by the end of this book, you will have the foundation to go on and comfortably start making your own games.
Chapter 1, Getting to Know LibGDX, introduces us to LibGDX and helps us to set up our development environment to get ready to create our first ever LibGDX project.
Chapter 2, Let's Get These Snakes Out of This Book!, covers creating our first game using LibGDX—Snake! This also covers the game cycle and how to handle input through LibGDX.
Chapter 3, Making That Snake Slick, covers creating game states, continuing with our Snake game from the previous chapter. This also covers an introduction to the techniques used to help with development and talks about handling different screen sizes and resolutions.
Chapter 4, What the Flap Is the Hype About?, explains how to create our second game, Flappy Bee, our own interpretation of a famous mobile game. Here, we are introduced to handling animations and using LibGDX's Scene2D to create a GUI menu.
Chapter 5, Making Your Bird More Flightworthy, explores our Flappy Bee game a little further, where we look at handling assets in LibGDX as well as using one of the tools—Heiro—for converting fonts.
Chapter 6, Onto the Next Platform...Game, introduces you to our next game, where we create a simple platform game—Pete the Squirrel! Here, we cover the use of a tile mapping tool—Tiled—and discuss how LibGDX integrates with it.
Chapter 7, Extending the Platform, discusses handling the LibGDX camera to create scrolling levels and introduces playing sounds.
Chapter 8, Why Are All the Birds Angry?, covers our final game in this book. We look at creating our own version of Angry Birds, where we look at how LibGDX and Box2D work together to create an awesome game.
Chapter 9, Even Angrier Birds!, closes our final game by looking at object pooling in LibGDX and showing how it can be used to help with performance and memory management.
Chapter 10, Exporting Our Games to the Platforms, introduces you to how we can use LibGDX to export our awesome games to Android, iOS, and HTML5.
Chapter 11, Third-party Services, covers integrating a platform-specific service into a LibGDX game.
It is entirely possible to enjoy and learn from this book without having to use a computer. However, I would recommend that you run the examples while you read this book.
The first chapter covers how to get your computer set up to run these examples. A computer with a minimum of a dual core processor and 4GB RAM is preferable.
This book is about getting started with making games using LibGDX. So, complete beginners are more than welcome on our journey to create games. No previous experience of LibGDX is necessary, however, some basic Java knowledge will help.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The Gdx.log() methods is extremely handy when it comes to debugging our games"
A block of code is set as follows:
public void render(float delta) {
batch.begin();
sprite.draw(batch);
batch.end();
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
java -verlsion
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Before we hit the Generate button, let's just take a look at what we are creating."
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