Chapter 1. Setting Up Your Development Environment

LibGDX's development is very powerful, and that is why we will set up a nice and stable structure to work with before jumping into the code and project structure. We will use IntelliJ IDEA to do most of our development for the simply because it's productive (and of course, there are few neat tricks to combine with LibGDX), though it's very common to use Eclipse for development too. There are other ways to set up a 3D game with LibGDX, but to start off this book; we will build the game with basic assets created by code. In this chapter, we will explain how to download and set up all the required tools to get you started with setting up an environment to build 3D games with LibGDX, and to work on desktop and Android platforms. Although LibGDX also builds for HTML (WebGL) and iOS, we won't cover these builds because they do not fit with our game, but they are as easy as the following documentation guidelines on the official site (http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/). You will learn more about this in this chapter.

Assuming you know LibGDX, you already have the Java Development Kit (JDK) installed and the Android software development kit (SDK) updated (you need API 22 with the LibGDX version [1.6.4]); otherwise, a simple Google search will do. The steps are OS-free and we will use Windows to implement them.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Downloading and installing IntelliJ IDEA
• Setting up the LibGDX project and importing it to IntelliJ IDEA
• Running and debugging the game