Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
When everything is up and running, the game logic is ready to take over and will
loop for the rest of the time until the game ends and will then be terminated. This
kind of looping is also referred to as the game loop. Inside the game loop, the game
logic accumulates all (new) data it is interested in and updates the game-world
model accordingly.
It is very important to consider the speed at which updates will occur in the game
world. Currently, the game will just run at the maximum speed of the available
hardware. In most cases, this is not a desirable effect because it makes your game
dependent on the processing power and the complexity of the scene to be rendered,
which will vary from computer to computer. This implies that your game world
will also progress at different speeds on different computers with an almost always
negative impact on the gameplay.
The key to tackle this issue is to use delta times in order to calculate the fractional
progress of the game world. The delta time is the real time between the last rendered
frame and current frame. Now, every update to the game world will occur in relation
to real time that is passed since the last frame was rendered. You will see how this
actually works with LibGDX in the later examples.
What you have just read was an overview of the basic concept to create games. Yes,
it is that simple! Frankly speaking, there is a lot more to learn before your application
becomes a real game. There are lots of topics and concepts waiting to be discovered
in this topic. For instance, you will need to understand how to use and manage
different images in an efficient manner. Efficiency becomes even more important if
you plan to target mobile devices such as Android or iOS smartphones, where the
available resources are constantly scarce.
Key to success lies in planning
Great! Now you have your development environment set up and a basic
understanding of what a game is and what it might need. It appears to be a good
idea to dedicate some additional time to think about your first game project and
create a plan for it. In general, planning your game projects is what you should
always do in the first place before any actual work is done. For novice game
developers, it might be very tempting to skip this planning phase, which admittedly
is a lot more fun in the beginning, but this approach is very likely to fall short in the
long run. You will need some sort of outline of what you want to achieve. It does not
have to be a very long and detailed description.
