Nebulinc Demo

[kruizer23]

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>

[Jimmt]

Wow, nicely done!
Looks really polished and the UI looks great.

[kruizer23]

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.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Slyth2727]

Wow, very nice job there man. Seems like a very well done AI and UI. How did you get into learning libGdx? I would like to learn a different way to make games other than plain Java Graphics, and am not sure where to start.

[Jimmt]

I highly recommend: http://steigert.blogspot.com/2012/02/1-libgdx-tutorial-introduction.html for an in depth tutorial. 
For a basic starter game: http://code.google.com/p/libgdx/wiki/SimpleApp

Important: There are 2 different ways in libGDX, using Sprites, or using Actor/Stage (more recent). I would recommend using Actor/Stage but it's your choice.

(I realize you were asking kruizer but I couldn't resist)

[kruizer23]

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.