What games did you enjoy playing in the past yourself? Try to determine why you liked them. What game mechanics did it use that appealed to you?

Assuming that you plan on developing the game on your own or in a small team, make sure you decide on making a game that you yourself enjoy playing. Trust me, it takes a lot of self discipline and motivation to develop a game from begin to end. You'll be playing your own levels hundreds of times before you actually release the game, so you better make sure you enjoy the game yourself.

What works for me is playing some of my favorite games at night, specifically old ones on the Znes-emulator, and then analyzing what I liked, but also what I didn't like about it. Then ponder some more on this before you go to bed. You'd be surprised about the ideas you have when you wake up.

I can highly recommend libGDX as a game engine. It has good performance and a good set of features, is under active development and there are lots of tutorials on the web.

As Jimmt said, I would also recommend going with the Actor/Stage approach (called Scene2D) assuming that you are creating a 2D game. It makes drawing and transforming 2D objects (Actors) much easier as you do not need to worry about rendering them out to the screen yourself. This is taken care of by Scene2D.

To get started, download the LibGDX Setup Tool from http://www.aurelienribon.com/blog/2012/04/new-app-libgdx-project-setup/. This enables you to setup a basic libGDX template project in Eclipse within a few minutes. Next, simply start developing a game. Whenever you get stuck and don't know how to do something, check out the tutorials and examples at http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/documentation.html or post a question in the forum at http://badlogicgames.com/forum/.

There is a little learning curve, but it is worth the effort. And keep in mind that your game is multiplatform too! Even if you plan on just targetting Android for you game, this is a real benefit because you can run and debug on your PC, which is way quicker than on a mobile device.

Thanks for the feedback. I spent quite some time on the UI and menu system. Even though it is just a demo version, I still wanted this part to be as close as possible to how I have the full version in mind. This way you get a bit of the full game experience, even though there are still a bunch of missions to be added.

After a few months of active development on Nebulinc - Galaxy Defender, I've gotten quite comfortable with libGDX and I am proud to present the playable demo to the JGO community.

It is a 2D top-down shoot 'em up game set in space. What's special about this game is the one-button joystick control. The demo is available for Window, Linux and Android platforms and can be downloaded from http://www.frostypants.com.

Over the next months I'll keep working towards getting the full release ready. I figured that by first releasing a playable demo I could start collecting some feedback and iron out some technical issues where necessary. With other words: let me know what you (don't) like about the game. All comments and feedback are welcome. Just be gentle  

Here are some screenshots:








and the trailer video:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/jyo_hPguf-o?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/jyo_hPguf-o?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>