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

Starter Classes


A Starter Class defines the entry point (starting point) of a Libgdx application. They are specifically written for a certain platform. Usually, these kinds of classes are very simple and mostly consist of not more than a few lines of code to set certain parameters that apply to the corresponding platform. Think of them as a kind of boot-up sequence for each platform. Once booting has finished, the Libgdx framework hands over control from the Starter Class (for example, the demo-desktop project) to your shared application code (for example, the demo project) by calling the different methods from the ApplicationListener interface that the MyDemo class implements. Remember that the MyDemo class is where the shared application code begins.

We will now take a look at each of the Starter Classes that were generated during the project setup.

Running the demo application on a desktop

The Starter Class for the desktop application is called Main.java.

The following listing is Main.java...