I really like OneDrive and actually extended my subscription to include Microsoft office for my family. I also back my code up using Android Studios built in code Repository which uploads your code to Google servers. So I back up everything I do to Microsofts OneDrive. I am paranoid about losing my work – whether it be a laptop malfunction or a fire that destroys my home. LibGDX works with Android Studio so it became the natural development tool for me to use. I have used Microsoft Visual Studio and tinkered with xcode and Android Studio before getting serious with writing games. It just made me appreciate the skill of good graphics designers even more!Īt the moment I am still designing my own unit counters because its something I enjoy but really I should hand all creative activities over to my graphics artist. I experimented with Blend for 3D graphics. I had used it before for simple photo touch ups and realized that using anything else would mean learning the controls for that particular app. I understood better what it was I actually needed from a graphic artist and I can knock up a prototype of how I want my game to look.

It gave me a better understanding of why I need a graphics artist. It has taken a lot of time away from my actually working on games.

I watched hours of ‘How to do it’ videos just to do the most simple task. I started off doing all my own graphics and they were crap. I am going to recommend here that if you are not a graphics artist then find someone that is. Very simple to use and fits my needs perfectly. tmx files it produces and works well with LibGDX.įor making my sprite sheets I use TexturePacker. There is a great community that supports it and I have always found an answer to problems when using it. Also I guessed at the time I would only need to use a small fraction of its power and Unity seemed to be overkill for what I wanted. I preferred LibGDX because I could use Android Studio to develop with and because it seemed to offer me more control over my game. I took a couple of online courses (with Udacity and Coursera) one which used Unity and the other LibGDX. To solve this there are tools like LibGDX, Unity and Game Maker that allow you to write once and publish to many platforms. The problem with this is that each platform has its own recommended coding language and its own platform specific issues. One of the first problems I needed to tackle is that I wanted to write a game I could publish on Desktop or mobile. Of course there has also been a huge market shift with the likes of Apple, Google and Steam offering a venue for your games. However in the last few years there has been an explosion in the tools available to Indie Developers to make the whole writing a game and publishing easier. You have to be good at graphics, music, story writing, publishing, marketing, project management and so the list goes on. I had always wanted to write a game and get it published but it always seemed so hard.

Lidgdx texturepacker