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)

Chapter 3. Working toward a Prototype

In this chapter, we will explain and develop a prototype of our game using only basic methods of the 3D API, basic Bullet Physics API, and Scene2D for the UI. It's important to cover a prototype development to see quick results and focus on the main mechanics of the game, this is also important for game design and fast iterations, hence being able to improve gameplay before it's too late.

Note that starting from here, you can see the source code in our repository (https://github.com/DeeepGames/SpaceGladiators) and get images and other files from the assets folder of it in the Android project folder. Make sure to be in the Branch: Prototype to see the code used in this chapter. Branches in GitHub are seen on the middle-left side of the link.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Creating our world

  • Moving the camera and our player

  • Understanding Bullet Physics

  • Adding enemies and a chase mechanic

  • Understanding Scene2D (UI)

  • Using screens