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)

Deploying to platforms


For the finishing touches of our game, we will deploy the application; for this, LibGDX comes with handy methods. Open the terminal in IntelliJ with Alt + F12 or navigate to the top-left side on View | Tool Windows | Terminal.

Running and deploying on desktop

To run on the desktop, we can use (other than the buttons on IntelliJ) gradlew desktop:run. Keep in mind that the running directory will be the in Android project's asset folder.

To deploy, we will use gradlew desktop:dist in the terminal. It creates a JAR file in the desktop/build/libs/ folder. It can be run by double-clicking or in the terminal by using java -jar jar-file-name.jar. Though the operating system needs JVM to run a file, it will work on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Running and deploying on Android

To run on Android, we will write and run gradlew android:installDebug android:run in the terminal.

To deploy on Android, we will write and run gradlew android:assembleRelease in the terminal. This creates...