This book will take you on an exciting tour to show and teach you about game development using the open source LibGDX framework. Actually, you have chosen just the right time to read about game development as the game industry is in a remarkable state of change. With the advent of increasingly powerful smartphones and tablets as well as the ever-growing application stores for desktop computers and mobile platforms serving millions of users a day, it has never been easier for Independent Game Developers (also known as Indies) to enter the market with virtually no risks and very low budgets.
In this chapter, you will learn about what LibGDX is and the advantages that it provides when developing your own games. You will also get a brief overview of the feature set that LibGDX provides.
Before you can start developing games with LibGDX, you have to install and set up your development environment accordingly. You will be using the freely available and open source software Eclipse as your Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to set up a basic project that uses LibGDX. It will feature a runnable example application for every currently supported target platform. These platforms are as follows:
- Windows
- Linux
- Mac OS X
- Android (2.2+)
- iOS
- HTML5 (using JavaScript and WebGL)
You are going to explore what a game needs by looking at it from a technical standpoint, and why it is so important to plan a game project before the development starts.
At the end of this chapter, you will be introduced to the game project that is going to be developed and enhanced throughout this book.
LibGDX is an open source, cross-platform development framework, which is designed mainly, but not exclusively, to create games using the Java programming language. Besides Java, LibGDX also makes heavy use of the C programming language for performance-critical tasks to incorporate other C-based libraries and to enable cross-platform capabilities. Moreover, the framework abstracts the complex nature of all its supported target platforms by combining them into one common Application Programming Interface (API). One of the highlights of LibGDX is the ability to run and debug your code on the desktop as a native application. This enables you to use very comfortable functions of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), such as Code Hot Swapping, which in turn lets you immediately see the effect of your changed code at runtime. Therefore, it will significantly reduce your time to iterate through different ideas or even to find and fix nasty bugs more quickly.
Another critical point is to understand that LibGDX is a framework and not a game engine that usually comes with lots of tools, such as a full-blown level editor and a completely predefined workflow. This might sound like a disadvantage at first, but actually it turns out to be an advantage that enables you to freely define your own workflow for each project. For example, LibGDX allows you to go low-level so you could add your own OpenGL calls if that really became necessary at some point. However, most of the time it should be sufficient enough to stay high-level and use the already built-in functionalities of LibGDX to realize your ideas.