My
few readers might remember
I sometimes explore, and play with, game engines and libraries. I
suppose it's a sort of “compensation” for my everyday work with
not-so-exciting middle-ware and web-services projects. I
already posted about Slick2D
libraries for Java games but I was looking for something more
complete and, most of all, that would allow me to develop also
Android applications.
LibGDX
is a Java game-engine that provide a vast variety of features for
developing games. It's mostly aimed to 2D games development but it
even provides some
3D features. In addition LibGDX can deploy games on different
platforms like Java desktop or Applet, Android, HTML5 and IOS (with
some extra requirement due to peculiar Apple developing
policies). Last but not least a LibGDX project can include additional
extension libraries helping to develop different aspects of game
programming like AI, physics or networking (and this is the why of
this post title).
First
project creation
You don't have to download
the whole LibGDX project in order to start to develop. LibGDX people
suggest using the handy utility they provide, LibGDX Project Setup,
in order to generate a skeleton project. The generated project will
be based on the Gradle building
tool that will think about downloading from the Internet all needed
libraries and their dependencies.
