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

Handling level data


It is now time to think about how we can handle level data to lay out our levels, put objects into them at certain positions, define a starting position, and so on. This usually implies a lot of work before visible results will appear because creating levels requires some kind of a tool to create, modify, save, and load their level data. Furthermore, before we can even load or save levels, we will have to define an appropriate file format to describe the data of a level.

Luckily, there is an easy route as long as we keep our requirements simple enough. We will not have to build our own level editor. Instead, we will use a drawing program such as GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) (http://www.gimp.org/) or Paint.NET (http://www.getpaint.net/) to draw an image where each pixel's color represents some object that is still to be defined. The position of a pixel in this image will also represent the position in our game world. Job done! We just defined our level format...