When life gets you down

Unfortunately no development has been done to Bullet Revolution since my last post, which was in January the 14th. Unlike my other projects, this was not due to lack of interest but rather due to life.

I have been very busy with school and work forcing me to invest a lot of time in learning other technologies and spending time on other projects. As a result Bullet Revolution gathered dust on my lonely Visual Studio 2010 solution directory.

But I still have the desire to improve my game developing skills so I think I have found a way to combine learning for school and learning game development. That is to actually rewrite my game to Java which my study actually requires me to learn. It's pretty much like C#, or actually it's the other way around but that shouldn't be a problem.

There is actually another reason I made this choice and that is "Open Source". Being developing in PHP for a while and following the development of Zend Framework 2 for a while really got me interested in the opensource nature of things. The opensource PHP and Java communities really seem to be very active and has a lot of great developers.

And the final reason is that Windows hates me and the OS has just completely failed me for the last couple of months by crashing and completely wrecking my computers which let me to say "Bye Bye" to Windows and welcome Ubuntu as my new OS and so far I love it!

Using LibGDX

I do not want to start developing my game engine/framework from scratch, at least not yet so I definitely want something like XNA to give me a headstart on development. After a little looking around LibGDX seems to be an awesome starting point. 

It's a Java game development platform that allows users to develop games for multiple platforms like the   for the desktop(using lwjgl and supports Linux, Windows and Mac!), Android and HTML5(using GWT).

Further development

My first challange would be to get the basics up which means drawing a ship and moving it around. The next thing that is important is drawing TMX tilemaps which shouldn't be that hard because I have already seens some java libraries that are able to parse TMX files, and I have even seen an example using LibGDX! Than the final thing that will bring me to the state the current development version is in, implementing BulletML. And again, this tasks will probably be an easy one because the creator of BulletML offers Java classes generated by Relaxer. And to be honest I have no idea what that is, probably some classes that help me parse BulletML files, but the demo applet is in java too so I can probably steal some code from that one!

As this blog is both a journal for my development process and a way to improve my general writing skill I will keep blogging about interesting parts of development.