Writing Mobile Games for Fun! (and Profit?)
Two years ago Troy and I were chatting about Flappy Bird.
A Flight Simulator in LibGDX?
So we've pretty much established that LibGDX is an awesome framework for 2d games... The Shaft and LoggerBill are both basic 2d games and so is our up coming puzzle game that we hope to release soon... But just how does LibGDX fare as a 3d game development framework? I've been wondering that. So, as a side project during 3 days of my Christmas vacation I decided to dive in and try to write a 3d landscape graphics engine for a flight simulator... To see if it could be done. There are some Android flight simulators out there, but I think they're all done in C++. Can LibGDX handle it?
Maybe... Yes!
Logger Bill - A Tour of the Tree (Part 2 - Support Classes)
Troy and I have tried to make as much of the code base generic as possible in order to re-use it in subsequent games.
This is evident in the design of the managers and other "support" classes and interfaces:
- ProfileManager
- AchievementManager
- LeaderboardManager
- Achievement
- Leaderboard
- Ads
- CloudSave
- GPG
- Tweeter
- Emailer
Read more: Logger Bill - A Tour of the Tree (Part 2 - Support Classes)
Logger Bill - A Tour of the Tree (Part 3 - Fire OS Support)
Reasoning
One of the Issues with using the Google Play Games Services is that it requires the Google Play Games app be installed on the users device and that is only available on Google Play.
If you want to support Amazon Kindle Fire devices then you can't use Google Play. You could of course detect the presence of Google Play and just disable those features but I wanted to provide an alternative for Amazon users.
Read more: Logger Bill - A Tour of the Tree (Part 3 - Fire OS Support)
LoggerBill - A tour of the tree (Part 1 - overview)
James and myself have lots of ideas for games that we would like to make a reality, and we had already decided when we were writing The Shaft that for future games a cross-platform library would be idea. We decided to write LoggerBill as a test-bed for future ideas because the concept was easy and we figured we could do a good job of it in a short period of time. It took us about two months to build the game from scratch by working on it only a few hours a week outside of our day-jobs. Our goals for writing Loggerbill were:
- Evaluate LibGDX as an option for future games
- Learn and develop a set of best practices for using Libgdx
- Share everything we've learned with the community and other developers
- Publish articles to bring us exposure and drive traffic to our site and games
- and lets be honest - hopefully make some money from the adverts.
Read more: LoggerBill - A tour of the tree (Part 1 - overview)