Book Image

Learning Libgdx Game Development

Book Image

Learning Libgdx Game Development

Overview of this book

Game development is a field of interdisciplinary skills, which also makes it a very complex topic in many respects. One decision that usually needs to be made at the beginning of a game development processis to define the kind of computer system or platform the game will be developed for. This does not pose any problems in general but as soon as the game should also be able to run on multiple platforms it will become a developer's nightmare to maintain several distinct copies of the same game. This is where the libGDX multi-platform game development framework comes to the rescue! "Learning Libgdx Game Development" is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with all the information you need to know about the libGDX framework as well as game development in general so you can start developing your own games for multiple platforms. You will gradually acquire deeper knowledge of both, libGDX and game development while you work through twelve easy-to-follow chapters. "Learning Libgdx Game Development" will walk you through a complete game development cycle by creating an example game that is extended with new features over several chapters. These chapters handle specific topics such as organizing resources, managing game scenes and transitions, actors, a menu system, using an advanced physics engine and many more. The chapters are filled with screenshots and/or diagrams to facilitate comprehension. "Learning Libgdx Game Development" is the book for you if you want to learn how to write your game code once and run it on a multitude of platforms using libGDX.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning Libgdx Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Modules


Libgdx provides six core modules that allow you to access the various parts of the system your application will run on. What makes these modules so great for you as a developer is that they provide you with a single Application Programming Interface (API) to achieve the same effect on more than just one platform. This is extremely powerful because you can now focus on your own application and you do not have to bother with the specialties that each platform inevitably brings, including the nasty little bugs that may require tricky workarounds. This is all going to be transparently handled in a straightforward API which is categorized into logic modules and is globally available anywhere in your code, since every module is accessible as a static field in the Gdx class.

Naturally, Libgdx does always allow you to create multiple code paths for per-platform decisions. For example, you could conditionally increase the level of detail in a game when run on the desktop platform, since desktops...