Oehlke - Learning Libgdx game development

Andreas Oehlke is a professional software engineer and a computer scientist who feels very much at home on any Linux/Unix machine. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and loves to assemble and disassemble software and hardware alike. An exorbitant affinity for electronics and computers has always been his trademark. His hobbies include game and web development, programming in general (software design and new languages), programming embedded systems with microcontrollers, playing sports, and making music.

He currently works full-time as a software engineer for a German financial institution. Furthermore, he has worked as a consultant and a game developer in San Francisco, CA. In his spare time, he provides his expertise to a German startup called Gamerald (http://www.gamerald.com/).

I want to thank my parents, Michael and Sigrid, and my brother Dennis for their constant and invaluable support, which definitely kept me on the go while writing this book. I also want to thank my close friends for giving me lots of helpful feedback, notably Sascha Bjrn Bolz with regard to providing the artwork for Canyon Bunny. Last but not least, I want to thank Klaus "keith303" Spang for providing the music track as well as the whole team from Packt Publishing, including all the numerous reviewers involved, for their great work in producing a high quality book.

Ebenezer Edelman is a British computer programmer currently living in South Africa. He has an eclectic and diverse set of interests ranging from technology, engineering, and science to literature, photography, videography, and music. His hobbies include playing the piano, designing rocket engines, and occasionally a game of chess.

He started game development by learning C from the manual of a C compiler and developing simple text-based games. Then, after getting to grips with C++ and the DirectX SDK, he attempted to develop a 3D physics sandbox game, which never got past the beta stage. After that, he learned C# and the XNA framework and made several 2D games before deciding to get involved in mobile game development. He did this using Java and the LibGDX framework, which he used to get some of his old 2D games to Android. He is constantly looking to broaden his knowledge, and he now uses Research In Motion's open source C++ game engine gameplay3d.

In addition, he has experience of Windows Forms (C#), the GTK+ toolkit (Vala), the Qt toolkit (C++), the Android SDK (Java), as well as the x86 Assembly language, Python, PHP, JavaScript, and HTML/CSS.

His personal website and blog is located at http://EbenezerEdelman.tk/, and he is on Twitter (@EbenezerEdelman) and Google Plus (+EbenezerEdelman).

Matthias Markowski is a passionate game developer and video game enthusiast who focuses on the field of Graphics Programming. He began his professional career in 2005 through his involvement in the demoscene. He has contributed to the development of the fast-paced action MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) "Black Prophecy" and the Wii U casual game "Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2013". He is currently employed at Ubisoft Blue Byte, known as a creator of excellent strategy games, located in Dsseldorf, Germany.

You can view his portfolio and contact details at http://mmarkowski.carbonmade.com.

David Saltares Mrquez works at the award-winning developer Crytek as a games programmer. The Nottingham-based studio of the company behind the Crysis series was his jump into the AAA industry in 2012. Since then, he has been part of the Artificial Intelligence team, developing behaviors, pushing character fidelity forward, and developing systems that are now part of CryENGINE.

He obtained his BSc in Computing Science from Cdiz University (Spain) where he founded the games development society (ADVUCA) in collaboration with other passionate classmates. Through the society, he organized several talks and workshops with a strong focus on open source software, all of which were a great success.

By always working on side projects, he the joined the Libgdx community, attracted by the richness of its features, open source nature, multiplatform capabilities, and the hospitality of its developers. Libgdx allowed him to create various games such as Freegemas (https://github.com/siondream/freegemas-gdx) and Math Maze (http://siondream.com/blog/games/math-maze/). In return, he contributed to the maps' API and is very active on the forums.

Further information is available on his blog (http://siondream.com), where he talks in depth about Libgdx, programming, personal projects, and his experience in game jams such as Ludum Dare (http://siondream.com/blog/game-jams/).

Chris Moeller is a founder of the game studio Ackmi Design and Engineering. He has been building computers since the age of nine and has been programming for more than 10 years. He had the opportunity to work for software companies as a PHP developer, Java QA engineer, and Flash developer, and he currently works primarily for Android. He has been an enthusiastic gamer for most of his life and has created many game prototypes as well as several finished games. He writes game tutorials on his blog at www.chrismweb.com, and most of his new games can be found through his company website at www.ackmi.com, which he runs with his wife, Megan.