Tween Engine

One of the things that made AndEngine really useful was paths and different modifiers. With those it was possible to animate and fade just about anything. Tween Engine takes this to a whole new level and handles interpolation tasks for any attribute regarding any given object. Sort of. But it works!

However, as we are getting familiar with Gradle and Android Studio the library needs to be added. Step one is making “libs” directories in both core and android and put the tween-engine-api.jar and tween-engine-api-source.jar into those folders. Step two is adding them to the corresponding dependencies sections in the build.gradle file:

compile fileTree (dir: "libs", includes: ['*.jar'])

Finally it is a good idea to rebuild the project, and that is it! A perfect and essential complementary library for every libGDX project.

Common libGDX Tools

Let us start off with just a few pointers about Android Studio and libGDX. Since Gradle is under active development, there are one important update to the libgdx-setup.jar that is compatible with the latest version (Gradle 1.11).

Another point is that libgdx generates bitmap fonts slightly differently than e.g. Andengine. There is a second tool that takes care of this issue called Hiero. There is a couple of good tutorials on how to use fonts with libgdx.

Finally, a classical tool for making tiled TMX maps is the Tiled Map Editor. We used this one to implement one of our first games called Soccer Kid – a retro Zelda inspired type adventure game where the player would kill monsters and explore by kicking around a football. Unfortunately the game had so many bugs (ehheemm…) that we had to take it off the market.

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libGDX

For a couple of years now we have been using AndEngine in our development to craft with graphics for our applications. Its a wonderful APK that has worked flawlessly and improved significantly over time. However, ever since Nicolas Gramlich, its main developer went to work for Zynga things has slowed down somewhat and newer developments like Gradle support is simply not there yet. As we have been considering using Android Studio as a more modern IDE (compared to Eclipse), Gradle has been one of those new features we have been struggling with lately. As a viable alternative we found out about libGDX through a tutorial on game programming in Android Studio. We are currently looking through the API, and it does look very promising! We might come back later with a comparison between the two.

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