Book Image

Building a 3D Game with LibGDX

Book Image

Building a 3D Game with LibGDX

Overview of this book

LibGDX is a hugely popular open source, cross-platform, Java-based game development framework built for the demands of cross-platform game development. This book will teach readers how the LibGDX framework uses its 3D rendering API with the OpenGL wrapper, in combination with Bullet Physics, 3D Particles, and Shaders to develop and deploy a game application to different platforms You will start off with the basic Intellij environment, workflow and set up a LibGDX project with necessary APIs for 3D development. You will then go through LibGDX’s 3D rendering API main features and talk about the camera used for 3D. Our next step is to put everything together to build a basic 3D game with Shapes, including basic gameplay mechanics and basic UI. Next you will go through modeling, rigging, and animation in Blender. We will then talk about refining mechanics, new input implementations, implementing enemy 3D models, mechanics, and gameplay balancing. The later part of this title will help you to manage secondary resources like audio, music and add 3D particles in the game to make the game more realistic. You will finally test and deploy the app on a multitude of different platforms, ready to start developing your own titles how you want!
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Summary


In this chapter, you learned about the workflow of the LibGDX 3D API. We will now be able to apply multiple kinds of transformation to a model, and understand the difference between 2D and 3D. You also learned how to apply materials to models to change its appearance and create cool effects.

Note that there's plenty more information that you can learn about 3D and a lot of practice to go with it to fully understand it. There are also subjects we haven't covered here, such as how to create your own materials, and how to make and use shaders. There's plenty of scope for learning and experimenting.

In the next chapter, we will start to apply the theory that you learned in this chapter and work toward an actual game! We will also go into the environment and lights as well as collision detection in more detail. So, there's plenty to look forward to.