11.
Sep
2012

Steam Machines – Dev Diary #2

4

As you all might know from previous posts we’re currently working on a new project titled “Steam Machines”. It’s a top-down arcade shooter in style of “Hybris” (Amiga) and “Solar Striker” (Game Boy). Something that we’re trying out for the first time with this project is to release a fully functional editor alongside the game itself. Basically we want to see what the community can do with the same tools we use to build the game. We want to provide powerful tools for modders and level designers to build some incredible things around our games.

With that goal in mind we decided to invest a good amount of time into building solid tools. We use the libgdx framework (http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/) for all our projects. Maybe less well-known is the fact that libgdx has an incredibly powerful UI system built-in. Table layouts, themes and all your default controls are ready out of the box. On top of that you get one huge benefit: Portability. Our Editor will run on Windows, OSX & Linux without any extra effort. Pretty sweet, eh?!

So naturally, we decided to make use of these features and build our tools with libgdx itself. The tools are still being developed but we wanted to give you a sneak peak at what to expect:

For anyone using libgdx to build their games: As you can see from the screenshot, you can build some pretty sophisticated UIs with libgdx! Well worth investing the time into learning it. It’s very, very powerful.

That’s it for today. We’ll release more details about the editor throughout the development of the game. Stay tuned!

4 comments on “Steam Machines – Dev Diary #2”

  1. AurelienRibon on said:

    Very neat! I’ll love building my own levels 😀
    Did you think about a way to share custom levels with every player? Some kind of upload mechanism, with custom screenshot of the level maybe.

    On a side note, “you get one huge benefit: Portability” : you know that I can only answer that swing is already as portable as libgdx :p (and I don’t understand why Sun/Oracle still didn’t release javafx on every platform… this framework is useless until then).

    But I agree that scene2d.ui should be much more easily themeable with its skins than raw swing. Now that I have my css engine for it, it’s okay, but it was a pain in the *ss for my first tools.

    Reply
    • Bach on said:

      We have thought about the sharing stuff. Nothing decided yet though 🙂 It could get interesting..

      Yea Swing is just as portable, though you won’t get it on Android 😉 Who knows we might even release the editor for tablets! But I guess I was more referring to other “native” solutions. And to be honest I take scene2d.ui any day over Swing. 😀

      Reply
  2. Ken on said:

    Hi, I’m googling around for example code to create a UI like yours. Do you have some tutorial or example references that you have used to learn this? Thanks.

    Reply

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