Where to start?

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Hello JGO-Community!
I recently finished reading/learning/understanding “Head First Java” and I’m very excited to start programming a simple 2D game to further improve my “skills”.

But I have no idea how to start. In my book swing wasn’t really a big thing and yesterday I stumbled across JavaFX 8 and now I’m not sure which one to use.

Most tutorials I found didn’t explain a lot. The authors just copy pasted code without explaining how things actually work.

Someone on the internet suggested Beginning Java 8 Game Development. Is it any good?

If you have any tips you want to share with me I’d really appreciate it.

I read several posts here and one says I should start with Java2D. I’m reading zetcode.com right now.

  • NoxInc
#2

Hi,

I’d look at one of the libGdx books - libGdx sits ‘above’ OpenGL so to speak (hides the complexity of direct calls to OpenGL) and makes for fast rendering needed in games unlike Java2D/Swing/JavaFx.

If you are competent at Java then libGdx is a good way to go and the books on this will help you tremendously as well as the JGO forums.

Good luck.

#3

Thanks for your reply.

Do you have a specific book in mind?

  • NoxInc
#4

As far as I know, there aren’t any (up-to date) LibGDX books. I would instead look at the Github repo:

It’s hard to give you a starting place because I got into LibGDX after a year of OpenGL/LWJGL, so I was already familiar with game development and graphics processing libraries. You could always go to YouTube and follow the tutorials this guy made:

Hopefully someone else can come around and give you a better starting place, good luck!

#5

Thanks a lot. I’ll look at those links now :wink:

#6

If you don’t feel comfortable using thirdparty libraries like libGDX, yet (can be overwhelming at first, but it’s worth it), you should favor javafx over swing:


#7

I’ll go for JavaFX first I think. But libGDX is the next thing I’ll look at for sure. Thank you all!