LibGDX Game Development Essentials

216 Pages·2014·25.34 MB·English

by  Juwal Bose

LibGDX Game Development
Essentials
Make the most of game development features
powered by LibGDX and create a side-scrolling
action game, Thrust Copter
Juwal Bose
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
LibGDX Game Development Essentials
Copyright © 2014 Packt Publishing
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However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: December 2014
Production reference: 1181214
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78439-929-0
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Credits
Author Copy Editors
Juwal Bose Roshni Banerjee
Gladson Monteiro
Reviewers
Pavel Czempin
Project Coordinator
Lévêque Michel Neha Bhatnagar
Sudarshan Shetty
Tom Wojciechowski Proofreaders
Simran Bhogal
Maria Gould
Commissioning Editor
Dipika Gaonkar Ameesha Green
Paul Hindle
Acquisition Editor
Meeta Rajani
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Content Development Editor
Anila Vincent
Production Coordinators
Komal Ramchandani
Technical Editor Sushma Redkar
Madhunikita Sunil Chindarkar
Cover Work
Komal Ramchandani
About the Author
Juwal Bose is a game developer, game designer, and technology consultant from
the incredibly beautiful state of Kerala in India. He is an active figure in social media
and game development SIGs, and he never misses a chance to speak at technical
conferences and BarCamps. He conducts technical workshops for engineering
students at professional colleges as part of open source initiatives. Juwal is the
Director at Csharks Games and Solutions Pvt. Ltd., where he manages research
and development, training, and pipeline integration.
He has been developing games since 2004 using different technologies, such as
ActionScript, Objective-C, Java, Unity, LibGDX, Cocos2D, OpenFL, Unity, and
Starling. His team has created more than 400 games to date, and many of the job
management games are listed at the top of leading portals worldwide. He was
involved in the development of more than 20 LibGDX games, primarily for the
Android platform.
Juwal writes game development tutorials for GameDevTuts+ and manages the
blog of Csharks. His isometric tutorial for GameDevTuts+ was well received
and is considered a thorough guide for developing tile-based isometric games.
This is his second book and he aims to keep writing and sharing his 10 years of
game development experience through more books. His first book, Starling Game
Development Essentials, Packt Publishing, was on another exceptional cross-platform
game development framework—Starling.
Juwal is a voracious reader and likes to travel. His future plans also include
writing fiction.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my parents and my wife, Dr. Nidhina Haridas, for inspiring
me to aim higher and try harder. My heartfelt thanks go to Eldhose P. Mathew, CEO
of Csharks, for allowing me to devote my professional time to work on this book.
I would also thank Anila Vincent, Meeta Rajani, and Madhunikita Chindarkar for
supporting me and all the other team members at Packt Publishing for giving me
this opportunity. A special thanks to Suryakumar for those brainstorming sessions
and Kenney for the open source art.
This book would not have been possible without the expertise of the technical
reviewers Tomasz Wojciechowski, Lévêque Michel, Pavel Czempin, and Sudarshan
Shetty. Thank you guys.
I would also like to express my deep gratitude to Mario Zechner, without whom
such an incredible game framework would not have existed. Mario, you rock.
Long live LibGDX!
About the Reviewers
Pavel Czempin is currently completing school in Germany and plans to study at a
university. He has also joined a program to complete some of the advanced courses
of computer science. There, among other things, he learned programming in Java.
In his free time, he works on programming projects and is interested in developing
computer games.
You can find some of his projects on his GitHub page at https://github.com/
Valep42.
I thank my father for encouraging me to review this book.
Lévêque Michel has a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, and he
worked in Java development for 7 years. He is currently working on a LibGDX
point-and-click game as a core programmer.
I would like to thank the author of this book and the team at Packt
Publishing for giving me the opportunity to review this great book.
Sudarshan Shetty is a cofounder of Neurolinx Software Technologies along
with his wife, Anuradha. He completed his engineering from IIT (BHU) and IIT
Bombay. He worked as a sound recordist before getting into programming. He
has also worked on Wall Street, developing trading applications. In his free time,
he experiments with organic farming and loves to play the guitar with his kids,
Shameen and Shamika. To find out more about him, check out his LinkedIn profile
at http://in.linkedin.com/pub/sudarshan-shetty/12/756/.
Tom Wojciechowski is an independent Java developer currently working on a
cross-platform multiplayer mobile game (www.asidik.com/blobrun). He holds a
Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Physics, and he has been a core developer for
the popular and award-winning LibGDX, a cross-platform Java game development
framework.
His current projects and blog can be found at www.asidik.com.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Wiring Up 7
Getting started 8
Setting up the Java development environment 8
Installing Eclipse 11
Setting up the Android development environment 12
Installing the ADT plugin and linking the Android SDK with Eclipse 12
Installing the LibGDX support plugins 14
Setting up GWT 14
Installing the RoboVM plugin 14
Installing the Gradle plugin 14
The LibGDX Gradle combo 15
Using the Gradle setup application 16
A Hello World project 17
Importing Gradle projects to Eclipse 18
Running the project 20
Exploring the project 24
Displaying the Hello World text 25
Running demos 26
Running tests 27
The alternate LibGDX setup 29
Summary 30
Chapter 2: Let There Be Graphics! 31
The ThrustCopter game 31
A LibGDX app's life cycle 33
Creating the Thrust Copter project 33
Planning art assets 34
The game scene 35
Populating the game scene 36