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

Putting it all together


We will now begin to fill the stub methods with some life. The game loop is a good starting point as it is our driving engine that keeps the game world updating and rendering in a continuous way. After that, we will add some sprites and verify that the updating and rendering mechanism is working fine. In order to manipulate the world and game objects, controls are added to receive and react upon user input. Finally, the CameraHelper class will be implemented to allow us to move around freely in the game world and to select a game object of our choice that the camera is supposed to follow.

Note

Additions and modifications in code listings will be highlighted.

Building the game loop

The game loop will reside in the CanyonBunnyMain class' render() method. Before we can add the new code, we have to import the following packages to gain access to some classes that we are going to use:

import com.badlogic.gdx.Application;
import com.badlogic.gdx.Gdx;
import com.badlogic.gdx...