So, I have a development environment, I have a good game idea, but I have not coded in libGDX, so where do I start?
Luckily, libGDX has a great website, and wiki, with demo games that will allow me to experiment… off to do so.
libGDX Tutorials for Day One
http://www.gamefromscratch.com/page/LibGDX-Tutorial-series.aspx
<Hours of Downloading, Coding etc. and reading tutorials>
The raindrop program was a success. I was able to download and get it running. The wiki was very helpful. The code that was used is a little clunky, not very optimized, but I cannot see any reason to recreate what the official site already documented. I did find a lot of valuable information online, but I am too early in my coding to try it out. I’ll document those sessions as find a need to implement them. For now, off to my lessons learned today:
1) Code enough to know what you need next – I my game now moves a blue circle around the screen based on touch and the keyboard. Outside of adding the up/down arrows, and changing the shape, the game is identical in function to the demo, but I added a Title Screen (that does nothing except waits for a keypress event and moves to the main game.
One item of note, I gave up on the web. GWT is painful to support, and I am making too many changes to continually be compatible with the web. I’ll keep the PC and Android as platforms, but GWT is distracting me from my main purpose, so it is being cut,
2) Graphics are a Pain – Coding your own game required graphics that you own and/or can distribute. I have created three basic shapes, a triangle, a square, and a circle.
Each of these have been created in mspaint and paint.net. I am not sure if I will use them throughout the project, but they match the theme, so they are staying or now. The title screen is simply a picture of a piece of plywood I have in my garage with… opps… looks like I need more shapes (adding a configuration gear, a stop sign, and a green play button).
Another note I have started using png files because sometime saving a jpg file creates a white background. With the png files, I can get the clear backgrounds needed for overlaying shapes (see the white background on the image above).
3) Design is now needed – I could go in two directions 1) Code or 2) Design. I am choosing to design first because I could waste a lot of time learning items, or worse, creating graphics, that will not be part of the end product. I’m not saying I will never code until the design is done, but I want code to be feature driven.