
Beginning Android Game Development with LibGDX - istotex
https://ubuverse.com/beginning-android-game-development-with-libgdx/
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smacktoward
When I was tinkering with an idea for a game a couple years back, I went with
LibGDX for my first attempt at a proof-of-concept. It seemed like it hit a
real sweet spot: something feature-rich that supported deploying on lots of
different platforms, while still having a workflow that felt recognizably like
_programming_ instead of the more visual, scene-oriented approach of engines
like Unity. (Which I've never been able to grok, despite multiple attempts.)
My Java was pretty rusty, but Java's so common that I could tell myself that
the time spent getting back up to speed was an investment that could pay
dividends in some other context, even if the game idea went nowhere. So off I
went.

Unfortunately, it didn't take long for me to discover that ( _in my opinion_ )
LibGDX suffers from the most common defect of Java-based systems, namely a
disheartening amount of verbosity and ceremony you have to master before you
get to the part where you're actually _doing_ anything. It all felt very
ponderous and heavyweight. Maybe there's no way to avoid that and still get
all the nice features it offers, or maybe it only feels that way if you're
simultaneously learning modern Java, I dunno. But after a fair bit of wheel-
spinning I eventually gave up.

I ended up going with Lua-based LÖVE
([https://love2d.org/](https://love2d.org/)) instead, which while much less
powerful was also much less daunting to get started with. I was able to reach
productivity with LÖVE faster than with LibGDX despite never having written
(or indeed _read_ ) a line of Lua in my life, which says something about the
relative barriers to entry.

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istotex
I have experience in Android development, but not game development, and I was
looking for something, as you said, less visual than Unity to get started in
game development. So far, the learning curve has been gentle. Maybe libGDX
shows limitations for more complex games, but it seems to me like a great
framework to introduce game development to beginners, especially if they are
already familiar with Java.

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Namrog84
Libgdx was one of the first game library frameworks I used when I first got
into gamedev. And even now years later. There are things that Libgdx did quite
well that I miss. Even in unity and ue4.

Id highly recommend using and playing with it. I'm not active now but there
used to be a great community. And some decently popular games and other tools
built with it.

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butz
While on topic on Android game engines: are there any without additional .so
libs? I'd like to make a simple 2d board game where high FPS doesn't matter.

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dukoid
For a simple 2d board game, why use a Game Engine at all -- opposed to just
using ImageViews inside a FrameLayout?

