Beginning Android Game Development with LibGDX

When I was tinkering with an idea for a game a couple years back, I went with LibGDX for my first attempt at a proof-of-concept. It seemed like it hit a real sweet spot: something feature-rich that supported deploying on lots of different platforms, while still having a workflow that felt recognizably like programming instead of the more visual, scene-oriented approach of engines like Unity. (Which I've never been able to grok, despite multiple attempts.) My Java was pretty rusty, but Java's so common that I could tell myself that the time spent getting back up to speed was an investment that could pay dividends in some other context, even if the game idea went nowhere. So off I went.

Unfortunately, it didn't take long for me to discover that (in my opinion) LibGDX suffers from the most common defect of Java-based systems, namely a disheartening amount of verbosity and ceremony you have to master before you get to the part where you're actually doing anything. It all felt very ponderous and heavyweight. Maybe there's no way to avoid that and still get all the nice features it offers, or maybe it only feels that way if you're simultaneously learning modern Java, I dunno. But after a fair bit of wheel-spinning I eventually gave up.

I ended up going with Lua-based LÖVE (https://love2d.org/) instead, which while much less powerful was also much less daunting to get started with. I was able to reach productivity with LÖVE faster than with LibGDX despite never having written (or indeed read) a line of Lua in my life, which says something about the relative barriers to entry.

Libgdx was one of the first game library frameworks I used when I first got into gamedev. And even now years later. There are things that Libgdx did quite well that I miss. Even in unity and ue4.

Id highly recommend using and playing with it. I'm not active now but there used to be a great community. And some decently popular games and other tools built with it.

While on topic on Android game engines: are there any without additional .so libs? I'd like to make a simple 2d board game where high FPS doesn't matter.