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)

Creating our world


We will build our world and talk about what's going on inside our structure. First, we'll start implementing our game world, the UI, and other screens later.

Creating our structure

First, we will set up a structure to work with and keep things organized. We will make a small image that shows how the structure is made:

The DesktopLauncher.java and AndroidLauncher.java contain the Core that will run our screens. The Core will call the first screen, the Main Menu Screen; from there we can go to the Game Screen or Leaderboards Screen, and move between them.

As good practice and to keep our motivation up, we will first build a Game Screen and an actual game to check design failures and see fast gameplay.

First, we'll configure DesktopLauncher.java using the following code:

public class DesktopLauncher { 
   public static void main(String[] arg) { 
       LwjglApplicationConfiguration config = new
       LwjglApplicationConfiguration(); 
       config.width ...