Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The target platforms, namely, Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X will
from now on be referred to as desktop and also share a project in
our development environment.
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 topic.
Diving into LibGDX
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.
