Tutorial 1.0: Briefing

To clarify the previous post a bit better, I’ve been making a 2D Android game (but it should be portable to iOS just as well). It’s quite different from Tower22 I’ve been trying to making for the past 10 years. For one thing, we’re doing it in Java, instead of old trusty Delphi. And yes, like most of you, I’m not exactly a big fan of Java. But difficult times ask for desperate measures.

Nor will it be high-end 3D graphics (though for today’s standards, T22 graphics is almost retro again). Not even re-inventing the entire wheel by making an engine from scratch. Nope, we’ll be using LibGDX, but more about that later.

The end-goal is just to make a simple but fun game that can run on a phone or tablet. By keeping it simple, I am hoping to involve the kids a little bit. Their attention span is 57 microseconds, so it can’t be too hard. I tried that before, but before showing even 1 pixel, dad was like “wait a minute (hour)… got to fix this first… hmm, that’s strange, why is not working?”.

I’ll try to keep each post small, doing 1 specific thing, though the code-blocks may make it seem long at times. Trying to post 1 or 2 articles each day, so, keep up the pace! Very soon I will explain how the game should look & play. But in more global terms, these would be the milestones:

1.       Basic engine (VERY basic, wrapper around some LibGDX parts)

2.       Making & flying over your first tile-based map

3.       Grabbing and throwing stuff
4.    Collision detection

5.       Adding foes & pathfinding

6.       Adding Sound

7.       Bonus items

8.       Making game-rules

9.       UI & menu’s

Or something like that. Again, at the time of writing, I’m somewhere at point #3. Thus, not that far. But as long as I don’t get sick (or if the virus is suddenly over, and we can all start drinking beer together again), I’m pretty confident we can get very far here.

With the lack of real LibGDX experience, forgive me if some of the tactics or code will change over time. Basically this is just an invitation into my way of “doing this”. Meant for those who are interested in making a 2D or LibGDX based game, but can use a helping hand. I DO assume you have a somewhat proper knowledge of either Java or C++ - I'll be showing a lot of code, but not explain "how to program". Unless it's a very complicated piece of code, but in general I'd like to keep it simple. I'm good at that, playing dumb.

Have fun & stay healthy.