mikesdevcorner.com - February 2015

Already since march 2013, our free of charge download game Dracoo the Dragon awaits you in Googles Play store. Now, we are planning on releasing him on iOS/iPhone/iPad as well. I took this opportunity to explain the level editor in more detail. After all, it is public and free accessible and we treated it shabbily after the release. We did not talk about it very much. In fact, we did not talk about it at all I guess. It is quite simple to understand and equally simple to operate. One creates a new level with a certain levelpack online, pushes it to the game server and trys it out in the very instant, still being in the browser. Maybe some of you want to distribute a new and challanging level for Dracoo the Dragon yourself. Or you just play around a little while and get comfortable with the editor.

If you send me some nice levels in JSON format, I will probably set myself to work and review your levels, pack them in a new and free Dracoo community edition or just add them to the existing levels within the actual game. Given they provide our high quality standard.

It would give me great pleasure, if you grapple with the editor and the game itself. The game is created to be played and to have fun with eventually.

So, enough said. How to create a level?

What we're about to do:

• Eclipse Gradle Plugin
• LibGDX Setup Tool (Download)
• Projekte Eclipse-Import
• Run HelloWorld

Within the scope of this post, we will finish setting up our libGDX development environment. After we already prepared our machine to develop Java by installing the Java Development Kit (JDK) and Android by installing the Android SDK (we did it here), we are going to take care of the proper implementation for the build automation tool Gradle, its integration with Eclipse and the creation and integration of the libGDX project files.

But what do we need Gradle for? Gradle allowes us the dependency and version management of the software tools and frameworks used in our projects in a very simple manner. For example, it helps us out with the updating process of the libraries like libGDX or box2d physics. In earlier days, before gradle and before other dependency management tools, it wasn't always easy to find the necessary resources, change them and link them together in the right way in your project. Gradle completely removes this burden from our shoulders. A fully fledged Gradle tutorial would be out of the scope from this tutorial, though. If you want do deepen your knowledge about gradle, feel free to check this site out.

What we're about to do:

• Java SDK 8 (Download Site)
• Eclipse for Java (Download Site)
• Android SDK (Download Site)
• Eclipse AWD Plugin 

Because the scope of this post grew a little bit larger than I expected, I divided it into two parts. This article will cover the installation process of the Java Development Kit, setting up the path variables in Windows and installing and setting up the right version of Eclipse. If you already have a JAVA SDK installed, you are free to skip this part. At least, a Java 7 needs to be present. Java 6 is not supported for our purposes. 

Today we discuss the matter of installing a Java respectively Android development environment. We prepare everything to run and debug LibGDX Code on your computer. It is necessary to meet some software requirements.

I will explain the required steps and settings for a windows system with the IDE Eclipse. Of course, everything discussed applies in slightely modified form to Mac OSX and Linux too. A very good alternative for eclipse is the IntelliJ IDEA from jetbrains, especially in the form of the Android Studio. I for one prefer the Eclipse IDE.

Lets take a moment to talk about Java first:

Java is a widely platform independent, object oriented programming language. But what does this mean in this context?